Abstract
We report on measurements of inelastic loss processes in ultracold atoms. Our apparatus creates ultracold clouds by sympathetic cooling with a reservoir in a quadrupole-Ioffe magnetic trap and subsequently in a weak, large-volume optical dipole trap. We demonstrate strong sympathetic cooling of in the magnetic trap, increasing its phase-space density by three orders of magnitude with no detectable loss in number. Ultracold samples created in this way are used to observe the variation of inelastic loss in clouds as a function of magnetic field near the -G Feshbach resonance and to measure the decay due to inelastic losses in all five Zeeman sublevels of the manifold, finding a particularly high three-body recombination rate in the lowest energy state. We have also observed and characterized a previously unobserved loss feature at G with a width of G, which we associate with a narrow Feshbach resonance predicted by theory.
- Received 22 July 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.81.012713
©2010 American Physical Society