Depolarisation cooling of an atomic cloud

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Published 24 August 2005 2005 EDP Sciences
, , Citation S. Hensler et al 2005 EPL 71 918 DOI 10.1209/epl/i2005-10181-4

0295-5075/71/6/918

Abstract

We propose a cooling scheme based on depolarisation of a polarised cloud of trapped atoms. Similar to adiabatic demagnetisation, we suggest to use the coupling between the internal spin reservoir of the cloud and the external kinetic reservoir via dipolar relaxation to reduce the temperature of the cloud. By optical pumping one can cool the spin reservoir and force the cooling process. In case of a trapped gas of dipolar chromium atoms, we show that this cooling technique can be performed continuously and used to approach the critical phase space density for BEC.

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10.1209/epl/i2005-10181-4