Tracking evaporative cooling of an atomic quantum gas in real time

Florian Schreck, N. J. van Druten

Johannes Zeiher, Julian Wolf, Joshua Isaacs +2 more

Continuously tracking the number of atoms in an evaporating ultracold quantum gas uncovers stochastic fluctuations, providing a platform for exploring the interplay between randomness and nonlinear dynamics.

Isabelle Bouchoule

Matthew L. Goh, Zain Mehdi, Taylor, Richard L. +5 more

Degenerate quantum gases are instrumental in advancing many-body quantum physics and underpin emerging precision sensing technologies. All state-of-the-art experiments use evaporative cooling to achieve the ultracold temperatures needed for quantum degeneracy, yet evaporative cooling is extremely lossy: more than 99.9% of the gas is discarded. Such final particle number limitations constrain imaging resolution, gas lifetime, and applications leveraging macroscopic quantum coherence. Here we show that atomic Bose gases can be cooled to quantum degeneracy using real-time feedback, an entirely new method that does not suffer the same limitations as evaporative cooling. Through novel quantum-field simulations and scaling arguments, we demonstrate that an initial low-condensate-fraction thermal Bose gas can be cooled to a high-purity Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) by feedback control, with substantially lower atomic loss than evaporative cooling. Advantages of feedback cooling are found to be robust to imperfect detection, finite resolution of the control and measurement, time delay in the control loop, and spontaneous emission. Using feedback cooling to create degenerate sources with high coherence and low entropy enables new capabilities in precision measurement, atomtronics, and few- and many-body quantum physics.

Kirstine Berg‐Sørensen

We discuss the kinetic theory for evaporative cooling of a dilute collisional gas in a trap. The analysis in O. J. Luiten et al., Phys. Rev. A 53, 381 (1996) is extended to incorporate a time-dependent trap strength and truncation energy. We employ the equations obtained to predict the efficiency of evaporative cooling of sodium atoms in a Ioffe trap and realize that a time-dependent trap strength can be crucial for the cooling. The calculations are classical in the sense that no effects of quantum statistics are taken into account: nevertheless the results of the calculations are useful in order to reveal experimental routes towards a Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms.

H. H. Wu, E. Arimondo, Christopher J. Foot