<p><strong>Figure 4.</strong> Quadrupole and hybrid traps. (a) Quadrupole trap (<em>T</em><sub>avg</sub> = 375 μK). (b) Hybrid trap (<em>T</em><sub>avg</sub> = 500 μK).</p> <p><strong>Abstract</strong></p> <p>We report the rapid accelerated thermalization of potassium (<sup>39</sup>K) atoms loaded in a magnetic trap, in the presence of a single dipole trap beam. More than an order of magnitude reduction in the thermalization time, to less than a second, is observed with the focused off-resonant beam occupying only 0.01% of the volume of the magnetic trap. A new method for testing for thermalization of relatively hot clouds is devised. The cold atoms are loaded from a magneto-optical trap (MOT) of <sup>39</sup>K that has gone through a compressed MOT and sub-Doppler cooling stage. The atoms are prepared in the magnetically stretched |<em>F</em> = 2, <em>m<sub>F</sub></em> = 2〉 state prior to loading into the hybrid trap. We also report a direct loading of <sup>39</sup>K atoms, prepared in the state |<em>F</em> = 1〉, into a single beam dipole trap.</p
