Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Metastable Bose-Einstein Condensates in a Linear Potential
D. Naik, Mishkatul Bhattacharya, Sérgio Ricardo Muniz, Chandra Raman
Abstract
School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332(Dated: February 2, 2008)We have created a Bose-Einstein condensate whose spin orientation is metastable. Condensateswere transferred into a quadrupole magnetic trap, where Majorana transitions limited the lifetime toa few hundred milliseconds, about 30 times the trapping period. Atoms held in the trap frequentlydisplayed a ring-shaped time-of-flight distribution. We speculate that such a ring could be either aquantized vortex or a feature of the Majorana loss dynamics in the quantum regime.