All-Optical Formation of an Atomic Bose-Einstein Condensate

Abstract

We have created a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms directly in an optical trap. We employ a quasielectrostatic dipole force trap formed by two crossed ${\mathrm{CO}}_{2}$ laser beams. Loading directly from a sub-Doppler laser-cooled cloud of atoms results in initial phase space densities of $\ensuremath{\sim}1/200$. Evaporatively cooling through the BEC transition is achieved by lowering the power in the trapping beams over $\ensuremath{\sim}2\mathrm{s}$. The resulting condensates are $F\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}=\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}1$ spinors with $3.5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{4}$ atoms distributed between the ${m}_{F}\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}=\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}(\ensuremath{-}1,0,1)$ states.