Adiabatic cooling of atoms trapped in a transformable optical trap

Wolfgang Ketterle, N. J. van Druten

Huiying Du, Yuqing Li, Yunfei Wang +7 more

Preparation of atomic Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) with tunable interactions in a quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) optical trap is essential for both the observation of bright matter-wave solitons and the quantum simulation based on the discrete atomic momentum states. However, the quasi-1D BEC has been obtained by a complex process, which includes the creation of a three-dimensional BEC and its adiabatic transform into a quasi-1D trap. Here, we report the direct creation of a quasi-1D BEC of 133Cs atoms by the fast evaporative cooling of ultracold atoms prepared by the degenerated Raman sideband cooling. We produce the pure BEC of up to 5.5×104 atoms in a quasi-1D optical trap with an evaporative time of 6 s. We demonstrate the anisotropic expansion of the atomic cloud after the release from the quasi-1D trap and study the dependence of both the phase space density and the temperature on the number of atoms in the trap during the evaporative cooling. Our study facilitates the promising applications of quasi-1D interacting atomic gases.

Philip H. Jones, Onofrio M. Maragò, Giovanni Volpe

Maxim Olshanii, David S. Weiss

We relate the entropies of ensembles of atoms in optical lattices to atoms in simple traps. We then determine which ensembles of lattice-bound atoms will adiabatically transform into a Bose condensate. This shows a feasible approach to Bose condensation without evaporative cooling.

Steven Chu, John E. Bjorkholm, Arthur Ashkin +2 more

Kenneth M. O’Hara, S. R. Granade, Michael E. Gehm +2 more

Summary form only given. Evaporative cooling of atoms in an optical trap has recently received renewed attention as a means for obtaining degeneracy in an optically trapped bosonic Cs vapor as well as a fermionic Li gas. We have developed a new model describing the evaporative cooling process for atoms confined in a time-dependent optical potential formed by a single focused Gaussian laser beam. We find that a substantial increase in the phase-space density can be obtained by adiabatically reducing the trap laser power and thereby the trap well depth as a function of time. Since we are specifically interested in the evaporative cooling of fermionic /sup 6/Li atoms, we have included the effect of Fermi statistics in the model. Although the collision rate is suppressed as the temperature T is reduced below the Fermi temperature T/sub F/, we find that values of T/T/sub F//spl Lt/1 can be achieved for suitable initial conditions.