Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the concept of evaporative cooling of trapped neutral atoms. The recent observations of Bose–Einstein condensation have shown dramatically the potential of evaporative cooling. Through evaporative cooling, phase-space density could be increased by six orders of magnitude in these experiments. In such experiments, evaporative cooling was used to reach temperature and densities that are unprecedented for trapped atoms and greatly exceeded what had been reached before by laser cooling. Laser cooling has recently broken the recoil limit in three dimensions (3D) and reached extremely cold temperatures of 3 nK in 1D. However, none of these optical sub-recoil techniques has been realized so far at high densities. The current density limitations are caused by the absorption of light, radiation trapping, and excited state collisions. An often-mentioned disadvantage of evaporative cooling is the loss of atoms. However, as discussed in the chapter, the efficiency of evaporative cooling is quite high.

Evaporative Cooling of Trapped Atoms

Henryk Sawistowski

Papers

Evaporative cooling of circulating water