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Deutsche Physikalische Gessellschaft IOP Institute of Physics

Evaporative cooling of unitary Fermi gas mixtures in optical traps

L Luo, B Clancy, J Joseph, J Kinast, A Turlapov and J E Thomas

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We measure the scaling laws for the number of atoms and the cloud size as a function of trap depth for evaporative cooling of a unitary Fermi gas in an optical trap. A unitary Fermi gas comprises a trapped mixture of atoms in two hyperfine states which is tuned to a collisional (Feshbach) resonance using a bias magnetic field. Near resonance, the zero energy s-wave scattering length diverges, and the s-wave scattering cross-section is limited by unitarity to be 4π/k2, where k is the relative wavevector of the colliding particles. In this case, the collision cross-section for evaporation scales inversely with the trap depth, enabling runaway evaporation under certain conditions. We demonstrate high evaporation efficiency, which is achieved by maintaining a high ratio η of trap depth to thermal energy as the trap depth is lowered. We derive and demonstrate a trap lowering curve which maintains η constant for a unitary gas. This evaporation curve yields a quantum degenerate sample from a classical gas in a fraction of a second, with only a factor of three loss in atom number.


PACS

03.75.Ss Degenerate Fermi gases

03.75.Hh Static properties of condensates; thermodynamical, statistical and structural properties

Subjects

Quantum gases, liquids and solids

Dates

Issue 9 (September 2006)

Received 27 July 2006

Published 27 September 2006



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