An ultra-high flux matter-wave laser from a highly flexible ioffe-pritchard trap

Abstract

This thesis describes the development and construction of a machine for producinghigh atom-number Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs). Emphasis is given to thenovel Ioe-Pritchard magnetic trap used, that consists exclusively of circular coils.This allowed us to achieve higher gradients and thus tighter connements [1].This thesis also describes a novel atom-laser output-coupler based on time dependentadiabatic potentials (TDAP) [2]. In this method strong rf elds are usedto deform the trapping potential. Contrary to the traditional weak rf methods thatextracts the atoms from the center of the BEC, the TDAP atom lasers emerge fromthe edge of the condensate. This provides the atom lasers with low divergence.Furthermore, the atoms are outcoupled from the BEC at an arbitrarily large rateleading to uxes per trapped atom sixteen times higher compared to the brightestquasi-continuous atom laser.Finally, presented is the coldest thermal atom beam to date. Using the TDAPoutcoupling, we produced thermal atom beams with temperatures as low as 200 nK,which makes it, by two orders of magnitude, the coldest thermal beam ever observed.Something like that would be very useful for high-resolution spectroscopy of ultracoldcollisions.