The final stage in the creation of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is trapping and compressing in a strong magnetic trap. When the spin of an atom changes, it is lost from this magnetic trap. To be able to do experiments with varying atom spin, one can use an optical dipole trap, which traps atoms independent of their spin. This thesis presents a far red-detuned optical dipole trap, which is characterized by trapping BEC's. Furthermore, an approach to rapidly scan this trap is presented, creating a 'quasi-2D' potential. With this potential we attempt to create a horizontal sheet of condensed atoms, where the depth of the sheet of atoms is smaller than the range of the spin dynamics. This would enable a unique visualization of the spin dynamics using spin-dependent imaging.
We report on our progress towards realization of a toroidal trap for Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of 87Rb using a time-averaged optical dipole potential. To achieve BEC we utilize a 20 W laser operating at 1064 nm to form an optical dipole trap in which we evaporatively cool the gas. Loading of the dipole trap is achieved by overlapping the dipole beams with a standard magnetic optical trap. Evaporative cooling is first performed in a single beam trap, followed by compression and additional confinement with a second orthogonal beam. This prevents stagnation of the evaporative cooling cycle, and allows the gain of 105 in phase space density necessary to achieve quantum degeneracy.
We report on our progress towards realization of a toroidal trap for Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of 87Rb using a time-averaged optical dipole potential. To achieve BEC we utilize a 20 W laser operating at 1064 nm to form an optical dipole trap in which we evaporatively cool the gas . Loading of the dipole trap is achieved by overlapping the dipole beams with a standard magnetic optical trap. Evaporative cooling is first performed in a single beam trap, followed by compression and additional confinement with a second orthogonal beam. This prevents stagnation of the evaporative cooling cycle, and allows the gain of 105 in phase space density necessary to achieve quantum degeneracy.