Realization of BEC-BCS crossover physics in a compact oven-loaded magneto-optic trap apparatus

Abstract

We report on a simple oven-loaded magneto-optical trap (MOT) apparatus for the creation of both molecular Bose-Einstein condensates (mBEC) and degenerate Fermi gases (DFGs) of lithium. The apparatus does not require a Zeeman slower or a 2D MOT nor does it require any separation or differential pumping between the effusive atom source and the science chamber. The result is an exceedingly simple, inexpensive, and compact vacuum system ideal for miniaturization. We discuss our work in the context of other realizations of quantum degenerate gases by evaporation in optical dipole traps and illustrate that our apparatus meets the key requirements of atom number and trap lifetime. We also demonstrate with this system the production of a mBEC, and we use it to observe the pairing gap of a strongly interacting two-component DFG in the BEC-BCS crossover regime.

12 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (20)

• Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Molecules
• Observation of the Pairing Gap in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Crossover from a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate to a degenerate Fermi gas
• Weakly bound dimers of fermionic atoms
• Collisional stability of a three-component degenerate Fermi gas
• Three-body recombination in a three-state Fermi gas with widely tunable interactions
• Precise characterization of ^6Li Feshbach resonances using trap-sideband resolved RF spectroscopy of weakly bound molecules
• Laser cooling to quantum degeneracy
• Fast, Runaway Evaporative Cooling to Bose-Einstein Condensation in Optical Traps
• High-resolution imaging of ultracold fermions in microscopically tailored optical potentials
• All-optical production of a degenerate mixture of 6Li and 40K and creation of heteronuclear molecules
• Observation of quantum diffractive collisions using shallow atomic traps
• Optimized production of large Bose Einstein Condensates
• Optimizing the efficiency of evaporative cooling in optical dipole traps
• Direct evaporative cooling of 39K atoms to Bose-Einstein condensation
• All-Optical BEC in a 1.06 micron dipole trap
• Molecular Bose-Einstein condensation in a versatile low power crossed dipole trap
• All-optical formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate for applications in scanning electron microscopy
• Pairing-gap, pseudo-gap, and no-gap phases in the radio-frequency spectra of a trapped unitary 6Li gas
• The influence of optical molasses in loading a shallow optical trap

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• Anomalous Behavior of Dark States in Quantum Gases of 6Li
• A 3D-printed alkali metal dispenser
• An Adaptable Dual Species Effusive Source and Zeeman Slower Design Demonstrated with Rb and Li
• High resolution photoassociation spectroscopy of the ${}^6$Li${}_2$ $A(1^1{\Sigma }_u^{+})$ state
• Transparent Electrodes for High E-Field Production Using A Buried ITO Layer
• Sub-Doppler laser cooling and magnetic trapping of natural-abundance fermionic potassium