title: 85Rb tunable-interaction Bose-Einstein condensate machine.
abstract: We describe our experimental setup for creating stable Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of (85)Rb with tunable interparticle interactions. We use sympathetic cooling with (87)Rb in two stages, initially in a tight Ioffe-Pritchard magnetic trap and subsequently in a weak, large-volume, crossed optical dipole trap, using the 155 G Feshbach resonance to manipulate the elastic and inelastic scattering properties of the (85)Rb atoms. Typical (85)Rb condensates contain 4 x 10(4) atoms with a scattering length of a=+200a(0). Many aspects of the design presented here could be adapted to other dual-species BEC machines, including those involving degenerate Fermi-Bose mixtures. Our minimalist apparatus is well suited to experiments on dual-species and spinor Rb condensates, and has several simplifications over the (85)Rb BEC machine at JILA, which we discuss at the end of this article.
authors.affiliation: Australian Centre for Quantum Atom Optics, Australian National University, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia. paul.altin@anu.edu.au
authors.forename: P A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Altin
authors.forename: N P
authors.initials: NP
authors.lastname: Robins
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Döring
authors.forename: J E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Debs
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Poldy
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Figl
authors.forename: J D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Close