Direct evaporative cooling of 39K atoms to Bose-Einstein condensation

We report the realization of Bose-Einstein condensates of 39K atoms without the aid of an additional atomic coolant. Our route to Bose-Einstein condensation comprises Sub Doppler laser cooling of large atomic clouds with more than 10^10 atoms and evaporative cooling in optical dipole traps where the collisional cross section can be increased using magnetic Feshbach resonances. Large condensates with almost 10^6 atoms can be produced in less than 15 seconds. Our achievements eliminate the need for sympathetic cooling with Rb atoms which was the usual route implemented till date due to the unfavourable collisional property of 39K. Our findings simplify the experimental set-up for producing Bose-Einstein condensates of 39K atoms with tunable interactions, which have a wide variety of promising applications including atom-interferometry to studies on the interplay of disorder and interactions in quantum gases.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Cooling bosons by dimensional reduction

Cold atomic gases provide a remarkable testbed to study the physics of interacting many-body quantum systems. They have started to play a major role as quantum simulators, given the high degree of control that is possible. A crucial element is given by the necessarily non-zero temperature. However cooling to the required ultralow temperatures or even simply measuring the temperature directly on the system can prove to be very challenging tasks. Here, we implement thermometry on strongly interacting two- and one-dimensional Bose gases with high sensitivity in the nano-Kelvin temperature range. Our method is aided by the fact that the decay of the first-order correlation function is very sensitive to the temperature when interactions are strong. We find that there may be a significant temperature variation when the three-dimensional quantum gas is cut into two-dimensional slices or into one-dimensional tubes. Strikingly, the temperature for the one-dimensional case can be much lower than the initial temperature. Our findings show that this decrease results from the interplay of dimensional reduction and strong interactions

Universality of the three-body Efimov parameter at narrow Feshbach resonances

We measure the critical scattering length for the appearance of the first three-body bound state, or Efimov three-body parameter, at seven different Feshbach resonances in ultracold 39K atoms. We study both intermediate and narrow resonances, where the three-body spectrum is expected to be determined by the non-universal coupling of two scattering channels. We observe instead approximately the same universal relation of the three-body parameter with the two-body van der Waals radius already found for broader resonances, which can be modeled with a single channel. This unexpected observation suggests the presence of a new regime for three-body scattering at narrow resonances

Bose-Einstein condensation of non-ground-state caesium atoms

Bose-Einstein condensates of ultracold atoms serve as low-entropy sources for a multitude of quantum-science applications, ranging from quantum simulation and quantum many-body physics to proof-of-principle experiments in quantum metrology and quantum computing. For stability reasons, in the majority of cases the energetically lowest-lying atomic spin state is used. Here we report the Bose-Einstein condensation of caesium atoms in the Zeeman-excited mf = 2 state, realizing a non-ground-state Bose-Einstein condensate with tunable interactions and tunable loss. We identify two regions of magnetic field in which the two-body relaxation rate is low enough that condensation is possible. We characterize the phase transition and quantify the loss processes, finding unusually high three-body losses in one of the two regions. Our results open up new possibilities for the mixing of quantum-degenerate gases, for polaron and impurity physics, and in particular for the study of impurity transport in strongly correlated one-dimensional quantum wires

Observation of confinement-induced resonances in a 3D lattice

We report on the observation of confinement-induced resonances for strong three-dimensional (3D) confinement in a lattice potential. Starting from a Mott-insulator state with predominantly single-site occupancy, we detect loss and heating features at specific values for the confinement length and the 3D scattering length. Two independent models, based on the coupling between the center-of-mass and the relative motion of the particles as mediated by the lattice, predict the resonance positions to a good approximation, suggesting a universal behavior. Our results extend confinement-induced resonances to any dimensionality and open up an alternative method for interaction tuning and controlled molecule formation under strong 3D confinement.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

An association sequence suitable for producing ground-state RbCs molecules in optical lattices

We identify a route for the production of $^{87}$Rb$^{133}$Cs molecules in the \textrm{X} \, ^1\Sigma^+ rovibronic ground state that is compatible with efficient mixing of the atoms in optical lattices. We first construct a model for the excited-state structure using constants found by fitting to spectroscopy of the relevant \textrm{a} \, ^3\Sigma^+ \rightarrow \textrm{b} \, ^3\Pi_1 transitions at 181.5 G and 217.1 G. We then compare the predicted transition dipole matrix elements from this model to those found for the transitions that have been successfully used for STIRAP at 181.5 G. We form molecules by magnetoassociation on a broad interspecies Feshbach resonance at 352.7 G and explore the pattern of Feshbach states near 305 G. This allows us to navigate to a suitable initial state for STIRAP by jumping across an avoided crossing with radiofrequency radiation. We identify suitable transitions for STIRAP at 305 G. We characterize these transitions experimentally and demonstrate STIRAP to a single hyperfine level of the ground state with a one-way efficiency of 85(4)%.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figure