Direct laser cooling to Bose-Einstein condensation in a dipole trap

Abstract

We present a method for producing three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates using only laser cooling. The phase transition to condensation is crossed with $2.5\times 10^4$ ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms at a temperature of $T_{\mathrm{c}}=0.6\mu \mathrm{K}$ after 1.4 s of cooling. Atoms are trapped in a crossed optical dipole trap and cooled using Raman cooling with far-off-resonant optical pumping light to reduce atom loss and heating. The achieved temperatures are well below the effective recoil temperature. We find that during the final cooling stage at atomic densities above $10^{14}{\mathrm{cm}}^{-3}$, careful tuning of trap depth and optical-pumping rate is necessary to evade heating and loss mechanisms. The method may enable the fast production of quantum degenerate gases in a variety of systems including fermions.

6 pages, 4 figures + supplemental material 4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Magneto-optical trapping of a diatomic molecule
• Effects of Interactions on the Critical Temperature of a Trapped Bose Gas
• Creation of a Bose-condensed gas of rubidium 87 by laser cooling
• A pumped atom laser

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Efficient ground-state cooling of large trapped-ion chains with an EIT tripod scheme
• Laser cooling for quantum gases
• Technologies for the ELGAR large scale atom interferometer array
• Sub-second production of a quantum degenerate gas
• Loading and Cooling in an Optical Trap via Hyperfine Dark States
• Rapid generation and number-resolved detection of spinor Rubidium Bose-Einstein condensates