An Optical Trap for Collisional Studies on Cold Fermionic Potassium

Abstract

We report on trapping of fermionic 40K atoms in a red-detuned standing-wave optical trap, loaded from a magneto-optical trap. Typically, 10^6 atoms are loaded at a density of 10^12 cm^-3 and a temperature of 65 microK, and trapped for more than 1 s. The optical trap appears to be the proper environment for performing collisional measurements on the cold atomic sample. In particular we measure the elastic collisional rate by detecting the rethermalization following an intentional parametric heating of the atomic sample. We also measure the inelastic two-body collisional rates for unpolarized atoms in the ground hyperfine states, through detection of trap losses.

7 pages, 8 figures, Rev Tex

References in corpus (2)

• Cooper Pairing in Ultracold K-40 Using Feshbach Resonances
• Sub-Doppler Laser Cooling of Fermionic K-40 Atoms

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Observation of Feshbach resonances in an ultracold gas of ${}^{52}$Cr
• Coherent transport of atomic wave packets in amplitude-modulated vertical optical lattices
• Anharmonic parametric excitation in optical lattices
• Cooling atoms in an optical trap by selective parametric excitation
• Nonperturbative and perturbative treatments of parametric heating in atom traps
• Self-organization of atoms coupled to a chiral reservoir
• Loading and spatially-resolved characterization of a cold atomic ensemble inside a hollow-core fiber
• Shaking-induced dynamics of cold atoms in magnetic traps