Berlin 2001 – scientific programme
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A: Atomphysik
A 16: Cooling and Trapping V (joint session A and Q)
A 16.5: Talk
Thursday, April 5, 2001, 18:30–18:45, H104
Fermionic lithium atoms in a resonator dipole trap — •Henning Moritz1, Selim Jochim1, Allard Mosk1, Matthias Weidemüller1, and Rudolf Grimm2 — 1Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, 69029 Heidelberg, Germany — 2Institut für Experimentalphysik, Universität Innsbruck, Austria
We report on the loading of up to 105 fermionic lithium (6Li) atoms into a far-detuned optical dipole trap, which is based on the resonant enhancement of laser light in a cavity [1]. The trap confines the atoms independent of their spin state and is therefore well suited for studying scattering processes in a Fermi gas that contains a mixture of states. In our experiment we use a diode-pumped 400 mW Nd:YAG laser whose light intensity is enhanced 130-fold, resulting in a trap depth of 200 µK. Compared to retroflected-beam standing-wave traps, the resonator trap is particularly sensitive to technical noise, which causes fluctuations of the light intensity in the cavity. This heats the atoms and currently limits their storage time to 1 s. We present a detailed analysis of the sources of this noise and compare different strategies to reduce the noise intensity. Since the s-wave scattering between spin-polarized fermions is forbidden due to the Pauli principle, thermalization processes strongly differ between a spin-polarized gas, as can be trapped in a magnetic trap, and a gas in a mixture of states. It is our aim to explore these differences and study Feshbach resonances between fermionic atoms.
[1] See poster by S. Jochim et al.