Optical trapping of cold fermionic potassium for collisional studies

Constructing a Magneto-optical Trap for Cold Atom Trapping

Collisional relaxation in a fermionic gas

We propose a method to study the degeneracy of a trapped atomic gas of fermions through the relaxation of the motion of a test particle. In the degenerate regime, and for an energy of the test particle well below the Fermi energy, we show that the Fermi-Dirac statistics is responsible for a strong decrease of the relaxation rate. This method can be used to directly measure the temperature of th...

Exploring Lattice Methods for Cold Fermionic Atoms

There has been a surge of experimental effort recently in cooling trapped fermionic atoms to quantum degeneracy. By varying an external magnetic field, interactions between atoms can be made arbitrarily strong. When the S wave scattering length becomes comparable to and larger than the interparticle spacing, standard mean field analysis breaks down. In this case the system exhibits a type of un...

Direct Observation of Optical Precursors in a Cold Potassium Gas

Physics) Direct Observation of Optical Precursors in a Cold Potassium Gas by Heejeong Jeong Department of Physics Duke University Date: Approved: Dr. Daniel J. Gauthier, Supervisor

Collisional properties of trapped cold chromium atoms

We report on calculations of the elastic cross section and thermalization rate for collision between two maximally spin-polarized chromium atoms in the cold and ultracold regimes, relevant to buffergas and magneto-optical cooling of chromium atoms. We calculate ab initio potential energy curves for Cr2 and the van der Waals coefficient C6, and construct interaction potentials between two collid...