Rb-85 tunable-interaction Bose-Einstein condensate machine

Authors :: Altin, P. A.
Robins, N. P.
Doering, D.
Debs, J. E.
Poldy, R.
Figl, C.
Close, J. D.
Source :: Rev. Sci. Instrum. 81, 063103 (2010)
Publication Year :: 2010
Abstract: We describe our experimental setup for creating stable Bose-Einstein condensates of Rb-85 with tunable interparticle interactions. We use sympathetic cooling with Rb-87 in two stages, initially in a tight Ioffe-Pritchard magnetic trap and subsequently in a weak, large-volume crossed optical dipole trap, using the 155 G Feshbach resonance to manipulate the elastic and inelastic scattering properties of the Rb-85 atoms. Typical Rb-85 condensates contain 4 x 10^4 atoms with a scattering length of a=+200a_0. Our minimalist apparatus is well-suited to experiments on dual-species and spinor Rb condensates, and has several simplifications over the Rb-85 BEC machine at JILA (Papp, 2007; Papp and Wieman, 2006), which we discuss at the end of this article.<br />Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures