Gray molasses cooling of ³⁹K to a high phase-space density

2013/10/15 by G. Salomon, L. Fouché, P. Wang +3
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas #physics.atom-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/0295-5075/104/63002

6 pages, 5 figures

arxiv created 2013/10/15 · arxiv updated 2015/06/17

Abstract

We present new techniques in cooling 39K atoms using laser light close to the D1 transition. First, a new compressed-MOT configuration is taking advantage of gray molasses type cooling induced by blue-detuned D1 light. It yields an optimized density of atoms. Then, we use pure D1 gray molasses to further cool the atoms to an ultra-low temperature of 6 μK. The resulting phase-space density is 2 × 10^-4 and will ease future experiments with ultracold potassium. As an example, we use it to directly load up to 3× 10⁷ atoms in a far detuned optical trap, a result that opens the way to the all-optical production of potassium degenerate gases.

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