Current Personnel:

• Michael Borysow

Former Personnel:

• Travis Briles
• Mike DePalatis
• Joseph Simmons
• Brady Stoll
• Michael Leach

 

New Intense Cold Atom Source
(currently seeking new graduate student!)

 

Coherent streams of atoms represent a new frontier in AMO physics. However, current implementations have some severe limitations including pulsed operation and generally low flux. Our experiment seeks to attempt to overcome some of these limitations by way of a novel loading and cooling method.

Rather than using previously-loaded Bose-Einstein Condensates, we use a supersonic jet of cold helium, seeded by a hot jet of atomic lithium which is entrained into the helium jet and cooled collisionally. The helium, expanding adiabatically, further cools into the low millikelvin range, leading to sympathetic cooling of the seeded lithium. This results in a continuous, relatively cool jet of lithium atoms which, with some further cooling efforts, could approach the levels of degeneracy necessary for coherence. In addition, some basic calculations suggest that the achievable lithium flux will exceed that of previous methods by orders of magnitude.

For a short overview, see this poster that Michael Borysow presented at ICAP 2008.

 

Cold Atom Source Full Schematic