Spin gradient demagnetization cooling of ultracold atoms

Abstract

A major goal of ultracold atomic physics is quantum simulation of spin Hamiltonians in optical lattices. Progress towards this goal requires the attainment of extremely low temperatures. Here we demonstrate a new cooling method which consists of applying a time-varying magnetic field gradient to a spin mixture of ultracold atoms. We have used this method to prepare isolated spin distributions at positive and negative spin temperatures of +/-50 picokelvin. The spin system can also be used to cool other degrees of freedom, and we have used this coupling to reduce the temperature of an apparently equilibrated sample of rubidium atoms in a Mott insulating state to 350 picokelvin. These are the lowest temperatures ever measured in any system.

4 pages, 4 figures; (v4) Shortened, added journal ref

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Quantum Simulation of Antiferromagnetic Spin Chains in an Optical Lattice
• Cooling in strongly correlated optical lattices: prospects and challenges
• Initializing an unmodulated spin chain to operate as a high quality quantum data-bus
• Entanglement Enhanced Information Transfer through Strongly Correlated Systems and its Application to Optical Lattices
• Thermometry and Refrigeration in a Two-Component Mott Insulator of Ultracold Atoms
• Controlling spin motion and interactions in a one-dimensional Bose gas