The use of off-resonant standing light waves to manipulate ultracold atoms is investigated. Previous work has illustrated that optical pulses can provide efficient beam-splitting and reflection operations for atomic wave packets. The performance of these operations is characterized experimentally using Bose-Einstein condensates confined in a weak magnetic trap. Under optimum conditions, fidelities of up to 0.99 for beam splitting and 0.98 for reflection are observed, and splitting operations of up to third order are achieved. The dependence of the operations on light intensity and atomic velocity is measured and found to agree well with theoretical estimates.
We study Bragg spectroscopy of a strongly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate using time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory. We include approximatively the effect of the momentum dependent scattering amplitude which is shown to be the dominant factor in determining the spectrum for large momentum Bragg scattering. The condensation of the Bragg scattered atoms is shown to significantly alter the observed excitation spectrum by creating a novel pairing channel of mobile pairs.
We produce a Bose-Einstein condensate of 39-K atoms. Condensation of this species with naturally small and negative scattering length is achieved by a combination of sympathetic cooling with 87-Rb and direct evaporation, exploiting the magnetic tuning of both inter- and intra-species interactions at Feshbach resonances. We explore tunability of the self-interactions by studying the expansion and the stability of the condensate. We find that a 39-K condensate is interesting for future experiments requiring a weakly interacting Bose gas.
Bose-Einstein condensates have been produced in an optical box trap. This novel optical trap type has strong confinement in two directions comparable to that which is possible in an optical lattice, yet produces individual condensates rather than the thousands typical of a lattice. The box trap is integrated with single atom detection capability, paving the way for studies of quantum atom statistics.
The recent achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation of chromium atoms [1] has opened longed-for experimental access to a degenerate quantum gas with long-range and anisotropic interaction. Due to the large magnetic moment of chromium atoms of 6 {$mu$}B, in contrast to other Bose- Einstein condensates (BECs), magnetic dipole-dipole interaction plays an important role in a chromium BEC. Many new physical properties of degenerate gases arising from these magnetic forces have been predicted in the past and can now be studied experimentally. Besides these phenomena, the large dipole moment leads to a breakdown of standard methods for the creation of a chromium BEC. Cooling and trapping methods had to be adapted to the special electronic structure of chromium to reach the regime of quantum degeneracy. Some of them apply generally to gases with large dipolar forces. We present here a detailed discussion of the experimental techniques which are used to create a chromium BEC and alow us to produce pure condensates with up to {$10^5$} atoms in an optical dipole trap. We also describe the methods used to determine the trapping parameters.
Our recent measurements on the expansion of a chromium dipolar condensate after release from an optical trapping potential are in good agreement with an exact solution of the hydrodynamic equations for dipolar Bose gases. We report here the theoretical method used to interpret the measurement data as well as more details of the experiment and its analysis. The theory reported here is a tool for the investigation of different dynamical situations in time-dependent harmonic traps.