Magnetic Trapping of Metastable Calcium Atoms

Abstract

Metastable calcium atoms, produced in a magneto-optic trap (MOT) operating within the singlet system, are continuously loaded into a magnetic trap formed by the magnetic quadrupole field of the MOT. At MOT temperatures of 3 mK and 240 ms loading time we observe 1.1 x 10^8 magnetically trapped 3P2 atoms at densities of 2.4 x 10^8 cm^-3 and temperatures of 0.61 mK. In a modified scheme we first load a MOT for metastable atoms at a temperature of 0.18 mK and subsequently release these atoms into the magnetic trap. In this case 240 ms of loading yields 2.4 x 10^8 trapped 3P2 atoms at a peak density of 8.7 x 10^10 cm^-3 and a temperature of 0.13 mK. The temperature decrease observed in the magnetic trap for both loading schemes can be explained only in part by trap size effects.

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References in corpus (5)

• Doppler cooling and trapping on forbidden transitions
• Quenched Narrow-Line Laser Cooling of 40Ca to Near the Photon Recoil Limit
• Continuous loading of a magnetic trap
• Calculations of collisions between cold alkaline earth atoms in a weak laser field
• Ultracold Metastable Calcium Ensembles, a Medium for Matter Wave Amplification ?

Cited by in corpus (15)

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• Sub-Doppler laser cooling and magnetic trapping of erbium
• Magnetic field dependent interactions in an ultracold Li-Yb(${}^3$P${}_2$) mixture
• Continuous loading of ${}^1$S${}_0$ calcium atoms into an optical dipole trap
• Two-temperature momentum distribution in a Thulium magneto-optical trap
• A novel route to Bose-Einstein condensation of two-electron atoms
• Inelastic collisions of optically trapped metastable calcium atoms
• Tunneling electro-conductance of atomic Bose condensates
• Sub-Doppler cooling of bosonic strontium in a two-color MOT