Bose-Einstein Condensation and Spin Mixtures of Optically Trapped Metastable Helium

Abstract

We report the realization of a BEC of metastable helium-4 atoms (4He*) in an all optical potential. Up to 10^5 spin polarized 4He* atoms are condensed in an optical dipole trap formed from a single, focused, vertically propagating far off-resonance laser beam. The vertical trap geometry is chosen to best match the resolution characteristics of a delay-line anode micro-channel plate detector capable of registering single He* atoms. We also confirm the instability of certain spin state combinations of 4He* to two-body inelastic processes, which necessarily affects the scope of future experiments using optically trapped spin mixtures. In order to better quantify this constraint, we measure spin state resolved two-body inelastic loss rate coefficients in the optical trap.

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• An acoustic analog to the dynamical Casimir effect in a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Cold and trapped metastable noble gases
• Violation of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality with matter waves
• Sub-Poissonian number differences in four-wave mixing of matter waves
• Tunable source of correlated atom beams
• Fast production of Bose-Einstein condensates of metastable Helium
• Magnetic-field dependent trap loss of ultracold metastable helium
• Feshbach resonances in 3He*-4He* mixtures
• Simple method for producing Bose-Einstein condensates of metastable helium using a single beam optical dipole trap
• Coherent coupling of momentum states: selectivity and phase control