Hannover 2013 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 18: Quantum gases: Mixtures, spinor gases, disorder effects
Q 18.4: Talk
Monday, March 18, 2013, 17:15–17:30, E 001
An ultracold mixture of metastable helium and rubidium — Hari Prasad Mishra, Adonis Flores, Wim Vassen, and •Steven Knoop — LaserLaB, Department of Physics and Astronomy, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
We are setting up an experiment to produce an ultracold atomic mixture of metastable triplet He (3He* or 4He*) and 87Rb. Our main motivation is the observation of heteronuclear Efimov trimers, where the large mass ratio results in a much reduced scaling factor between successive Efimov states, compared to the homonuclear case. Our strategy to reach an ultracold mixture starts with a two-species 3D-MOT, loaded from a Zeeman slower (He*) and a 2D-MOT (Rb). Afterwards the mixture is transferred to a quadrupole magnetic trap (QMT) and a 1557-nm optical dipole trap for forced evaporative cooling of Rb and sympathetic cooling of He*. Recently we have realized the two-species 3D-MOT, in which we load 107 4He* and 109 87Rb atoms in a few seconds. After optical molasses and spin polarizing Rb, we transfer the ultracold mixture into the QMT. For the doubly spin-polarized mixture (4He*: mJ=+1, 87Rb: F=2, mF=+2), Penning ionization is suppressed because of spin conservation [1]. First experiments will concentrate on Penning ionization, sympathetic cooling and Majorana loss of the ultracold mixture trapped in the QMT.
[1] L. J. Byron, R. G. Dall, Wu Rugway, A. G. Truscott, New. J. Phys. 12, 013004 (2010)