The atom laser has long been a holy grail within atom physics and with the creation of an atom laser we hope to bring a similar revolution in to the field of atom optics. With the creation of the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) in 1995 the path to an atom laser was initiated. An atom laser is continues source of BEC. In a Bose condensate all the atoms occupy the same quantum state and can be described by the same wave function and phase. With an atom laser the De Broglie wavelength of atoms can be much smaller than the wavelength of light. Due to the ultimate control over the atoms the atom laser is very interesting for atom optics, lithography, metrology, etching and deposition of atoms on a surface. All previous atom lasers have been created from atoms coupled out from an existing Bose-Einstein Condensate. There are different approaches but common to them all is that the duration of the output of the atom laser is limited by the size of the initial BEC and they all have a low flux. This leaves the quest to build a continuous high flux atom laser. An alternative approach to a continuous BEC beam is to channel a continuous ultra cold atomic beam into a magnetic guide and then cool this beam down to degeneracy. Cooling down a continuous beam of atoms faces three large problems: The collision rate has to be large enough for effective rethermalization, since evaporative cooling in 2D is not as effective as in 3D and a large thermal conductivity due to atoms with a high angular momentum causes heating downstream in the guide. We have built a 4 meter magnetic guide that is placed on a downward slope with a magnetic barrier in the end. In the guide we load packets of ultra cold rubidium atoms with a frequency rate large enough for the packets to merge together to form a continuous atomic beam. The atomic beam is supersonic and when the beam reaches the end barrier it will return and collide with itself. The collisions lowers the velocity of the beam into subsonic velocities and a shock wave is created between the two velocity regions. In order to conserve number of particle, momentum and enthalpy the density of the atomic beam passing through the shock wave must increase. We have build such a shock wave in an atomic beam and observed the density increase due to this. As an extra feature having a subsonic beam on a downward slope adds an extra density increase due to gravitational compression. Loading ultra cold atoms into a 3D trap from the dense subsonic beam overcomes the problem with 2D cooling and thermal conductivity. This was done and evaporative cooling was applied creating an unprecedented large number rubidium BEC.
We demonstrate experimentally the continuous and pulsed loading of a slow and cold atomic beam into a magnetic guide. The slow beam is produced using a vapor loaded laser trap, which ensures two-dimensional magneto-optical trapping, as well as cooling by a moving molasses along the third direction. It provides a continuous flux larger than
109 atoms/s with an adjustable mean velocity ranging from 0.3 to 3 m/s, and with longitudinal and transverse temperatures smaller than
100μK. Up to
3108 atoms/s are injected into the magnetic guide and subsequently guided over a distance of 40 cm.