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.

arXiv comment4 figures

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 ?

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• 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
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• 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