A continuously pumped reservoir of ultracold atoms

Abstract

Typical sources of ultracold atoms operate with a considerable delay between the delivery of ensembles due to sequential trapping and cooling schemes. Therefore, alternative schemes for the continuous generation of ultracold atoms are highly desirable. Here, we demonstrate the continuous loading of a magnetic trap from a quasi-continuous atom beam. We achieve a steady state with $3.8\times 10^7$ magnetically trapped atoms and a temperature of $102\mu$K. The ensemble is protected from laser light sources, a requirement for its application for metrological tasks or sympathetic cooling. The continuous scheme is robust and applicable to a wide range of particles and trapping potentials.

5 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (4)

• A pumped atom laser
• Continuous Centrifuge Decelerator for Polar Molecules
• Behavior of a very large magneto-optical trap
• A hexapole-compensated magneto-optical trap on a mesoscopic atom chip

Cited by in corpus (2)

• A steady-state magneto-optical trap with 100 fold improved phase-space density
• Non-equilibrium properties of a pumped-decaying Bose-condensed electron-hole gas in the BCS-BEC crossover region