Fast production of Bose-Einstein condensates of metastable Helium

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a hybrid cooling method for metastable Helium-4 that produces Bose-Einstein condensates rapidly, with improved stability and access, enabling faster data collection for quantum correlation studies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid cooling approach combining magnetic and optical trapping to produce BECs of Helium-4 more quickly and reliably than previous methods.

Findings

Achieved BEC with 5x10^5 atoms in 6 seconds

Enhanced cycle stability and optical access

Faster production rate by a factor of 3

Abstract

We report on the Bose-Einstein condensation of metastable Helium-4 atoms using a hybrid approach, consisting of a magnetic quadrupole and a crossed optical dipole trap. In our setup we cross the phase transition with 2x10^6 atoms, and we obtain pure condensates of 5x10^5 atoms in the optical trap. This novel approach to cooling Helium-4 provides enhanced cycle stability, large optical access to the atoms and results in production of a condensate every 6 seconds - a factor 3 faster than the state-of-the-art. This speed-up will dramatically reduce the data acquisition time needed for the measurement of many particle correlations, made possible by the ability of metastable Helium to be detected individually.