Buffer gas cooling and trapping of atoms with small magnetic moments

Abstract

Buffer gas cooling was extended to trap atoms with small magnetic moment (mu). For mu greater than or equal to 3mu_B, 1e12 atoms were buffer gas cooled, trapped, and thermally isolated in ultra high vacuum with roughly unit efficiency. For mu < 3mu_B, the fraction of atoms remaining after full thermal isolation was limited by two processes: wind from the rapid removal of the buffer gas and desorbing helium films. In our current apparatus we trap atoms with mu greater than or equal to 1.1mu_B, and thermally isolate atoms with mu greater than or equal to 2mu_B. Extrapolation of our results combined with simulations of the loss processes indicate that it is possible to trap and evaporatively cool mu = 1mu_B atoms using buffer gas cooling.

17 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Quantum phases of dipolar bosons in optical lattices
• Roton-maxon spectrum and stability of trapped dipolar condensates
• Superfluid pairing in a polarized dipolar Fermi gas
• Bose-Einstein condensation into non-equilibrium states studied by condensate focusing
• Determination of the s-wave Scattering Length of Chromium

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Cold and Ultracold Molecules: Science, Technology, and Applications
• Lasercooled RaF as a promising candidate to measure molecular parity violation
• Magnetic trapping of atomic nitrogen (14^N) and cotrapping of NH (X-triplet-Sigma-)
• Formation of van der Waals molecules in buffer gas cooled magnetic traps
• Collisional properties of cold spin-polarized nitrogen gas: theory, experiment, and prospects as a sympathetic coolant for trapped atoms and molecules
• Spin-exchange collisions of submerged shell atoms below 1 Kelvin
• Dynamics of a buffer-gas-loaded, deep optical trap for molecules