English

A Large Atom Number Metastable Helium Bose-Einstein Condensate

Other Condensed Matter 2007-05-23 v2

Abstract

We have produced a Bose-Einstein condensate of metastable helium (4He*) containing over 1.5x10^7 atoms, which is a factor of 25 higher than previously achieved. The improved starting conditions for evaporative cooling are obtained by applying one-dimensional Doppler cooling inside a magnetic trap. The same technique is successfully used to cool the spin-polarized fermionic isotope (3He*), for which thermalizing collisions are highly suppressed. Our detection techniques include absorption imaging, time-of-flight measurements on a microchannel plate detector and ion counting to monitor the formation and decay of the condensate.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0510006,
  title  = {A Large Atom Number Metastable Helium Bose-Einstein Condensate},
  author = {A. S. Tychkov and T. Jeltes and J. M. McNamara and P. J. J. Tol and N. Herschbach and W. Hogervorst and W. Vassen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0510006},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures (changed content)

R2 v1 2026-07-22T11:23:27.822Z