Physical Review A
Parametric excitation of Rb87 atoms in a quadrupole-Ioffe-configuration trap
Shuyu Zhou, Zhen Xu, Shanyu Zhou, Liang Liu, Yuzhu Wang
Abstract
We have experimentally studied the parametric excitation of $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms in a quadrupole-Ioffe-configuration trap. The temperature of an atomic cloud and number of trapped atoms versus time and modulation frequency of the parametric excitation field have been measured. We also noticed that the contribution of atomic collisions to the energy distributions can not be ignored in the case of weak excitation, which results in a lower temperature of the atomic cloud than by Gehm et al. [Phys. Rev. A 58, 3914 (1998)] predicted.