Abstract
We study the evaporative cooling of magnetically trapped atomic hydrogen on the basis of the kinetic theory of a Bose gas. The dynamics of trapped atoms is described by the coupled differential equations, considering both the evaporation and dipolar spin relaxation processes. The numerical time-evolution calculations quantitatively agree with the recent experiment of Bose-Einstein condensation with atomic hydrogen. It is demonstrated that the balance between evaporative cooling and heating due to dipolar relaxation limits the number of condensates to and the corresponding condensate fraction to a small value of 4% as observed experimentally.
- Received 1 February 2000
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.62.033602
©2000 American Physical Society