David Guéry-Odelin
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS Paris
 
 
Last progress towards the generation of a continuous atom laser
 
Abstract: In this seminar, I will report on the work we did to produce a beam of cold atoms 
and to transpose to it the cooling techniques used to achieve Bose Einstein condensate (BEC), 
with the aim of generating a continuous beam in the degenerate regime. 
I will comment on the possible applications on this new tool.
 
The last step of cooling in BEC experiment is the evaporative cooling. 
This technique consists in removing the most energetic atoms resulting
from elastic collisions. I will explain our strategy to generate a magnetically 
guided beam of cold atoms in the required collisional regime, and report the
gain in phase space density we have achieved so far using this technique.
 
In the second part of my talk, I will report on the new experimental tools we 
are currently developing to overcome the limitations of our previous setup. 
We will focus the discussion on the production and manipulation of atomic packets with: 
(i) the use of a magnetic moving mirror, which acts as a Maxwell demon, 
(ii) the production of an all optical spinor BEC, discussing our strategies for performing spin
distillation and possible applications, 
(iii) optical tweezers to transport atoms in the non-adiabatic regime.