Metastable Bose-Einstein Condensate in a Linear Potential

Abstract

We have created a Bose-Einstein condensate whose spin orientation is metastable. Condensates were transferred into a quadrupole magnetic trap, where Majorana transitions limited the lifetime to a few hundred milliseconds, about 30 times the trapping period. Atoms held in the trap frequently displayed a ring-shaped time-of-flight distribution. We speculate that such a ring could be either a quantized vortex or a feature of the Majorana loss dynamics in the quantum regime.

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Molecules
• Conversion of an Atomic Fermi Gas to a Long-Lived Molecular Bose Gas
• Non-linear unbalanced Bessel beams: Stationary conical waves supported by nonlinear losses
• An Optically Plugged Quadrupole Trap for Bose-Einstein Condensates

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Optical ferris wheel for ultracold atoms
• A large magnetic storage ring for Bose-Einstein condensates
• Dark dynamic acousto-optic ring lattices for ultracold atoms
• Axicon Lens for Coherent Matter Waves
• Controlled light shaping via phase dependent electromagnetically induced transparency
• Nonadiabatic production of spinor condensates with a QUIC trap