Browsing by Author "Strecker, Kevin E."

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    Conversion of an Atomic Fermi Gas to a Long-Lived Molecular Bose Gas
    (American Physical Society, 2003) Strecker, Kevin E.; Partridge, Guthrie B.; Hulet, Randall G.; Rice Quantum Institute
    We have converted an ultracold Fermi gas of Li6 atoms into an ultracold gas of Li26 molecules by adiabatic passage through a Feshbach resonance. Approximately 1.5×105 molecules in the least-bound, v=38, vibrational level of the X1Σ+g singlet state are produced with an efficiency of 50%. The molecules remain confined in an optical trap for times of up to 1 s before we dissociate them by a reverse adiabatic sweep.
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    Formation and propagation of matter-wave soliton trains
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2002) Strecker, Kevin E.; Partridge, Guthrie B.; Truscott, Andrew G.; Hulet, Randall G.; Rice Quantum Institute
    Attraction between the atoms of a Bose-Einstein condensate renders it unstable to collapse, although a condensate with a limited number of atoms [1] can be stabilized [2] by confinement in an atom trap. However, beyond this number the condensate collapses [3, 4, 5]. Condensates constrained to one-dimensional motion with attractive interactions are predicted to form stable solitons, in which the attractive forces exactly compensate for wave-packet dispersion [1]. Here we report the formation of bright solitons of 7Li atoms in a quasi-one-dimensional optical trap, by magnetically tuning the interactions in a stable Bose-Einstein condensate from repulsive to attractive. The solitons are set in motion by offsetting the optical potential, and are observed to propagate in the potential for many oscillatory cycles without spreading. We observe a soliton train, containing many solitons; repulsive interactions between neighbouring solitons are inferred from their motion.