Optical and evaporative cooling of cesium atoms in the gravito-optical surface trap

Abstract

We report on cooling of an atomic cesium gas closely above an evanescent-wave atom mirror. At high densitities, optical cooling based on inelastic reflections is found to be limited by a density-dependent excess temperature and trap loss due to ultracold collisions involving repulsive molecular states. Nevertheless, very good starting conditions for subsequent evaporative cooling are obtained. Our first evaporation experiments show a temperature reduction from 10muK down to 300nK along with a gain in phase-space density of almost two orders of magnitude.

8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Journal of Modern Optics, special issue "Fundamentals of Quantum Optics V", edited by F. Ehlotzky

References in corpus (3)

• Reversible Formation of a Bose-Einstein Condensate
• The Fermi accelerator in atom optics
• Very long storage times and evaporative cooling of cesium atoms in a quasi-electrostatic dipole trap

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Optimized production of a cesium Bose-Einstein condensate
• Cold atom gas at very high densities in an optical surface microtrap
• A cesium gas strongly confined in one dimension : sideband cooling and collisional properties
• Quasi one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate in gravito-optical surface trap
• Novel, Retroreflective, Magneto-Optical Trap Near a Surface