S. Charles Doret ’02 – Harvard University
“Look Ma – no lasers! Towards Bose-Einstein condensation of metastable helium via buffer gas cooling”
Advances in the cooling and trapping of atoms and the achievement of quantum degeneracy in dilute atomic gases has led to new developments in many sub-fields of atomic physics, including atom optics, superfluidity in atomic gases, precision measurement, quantum computation, and others. Nearly all of this work has utilized laser cooling as a first step towards quantum degeneracy; as such, limitations of laser cooling have restricted these developments to atoms and ions which effectively have only one electron, such as the alkalis. Buffer gas cooling is an alternative method for loading a magnetic trap which does not share these same limitations, making new atomic and molecular species available for study. Demonstration of a general method for achieving Bose-Einstein condensation without laser cooling would open the way to a host of new experiments in ultra-cold atomic physics.