We report on a dual species laser cooling apparatus capable of collecting over 10 8 87 Rb or 85 Rb atoms from an atomic vapor or up to (8 ± 2) × 10 7 6 Li atoms directly into a magneto-optic trap (MOT) from an effusive oven without the need for a Zeeman slower. The use of a miniature atomic oven placed close to the trapping region yields a compact vacuum system while still producing adequate lithium ensembles and a high quality vacuum in the 10 −10 Torr range. The atomic sources, laser system, and vacuum system are described. In addition, we use this system to study atom loss from the MOT due to interspecies collisions between 6 Li and 85 Rb or 87 Rb. We report for the first time the heteronuclear loss coefficients for 6 Li-85 Rb mixtures.

We present a method for determining the depth of an atomic or molecular trap of any type. This method relies on a measurement of the trap loss rate induced by collisions with background gas particles. Given a fixed gas composition, the loss rate uniquely determines the trap depth. Because of the "soft" long-range nature of the van der Waals interaction, these collisions transfer kinetic energy to trapped particles across a broad range of energy scales, from room temperature to the microkelvin energy scale. The resulting loss rate therefore exhibits a significant variation over an enormous range of trap depths, making this technique a powerful diagnostic with a large dynamic range. We present trap depth measurements of a Rb magneto-optical trap using this method and a different technique that relies on measurements of loss rates during optical excitation of colliding atoms to a repulsive molecular state. The main advantage of the method presented here is its large dynamic range and applicability to traps of any type requiring only knowledge of the background gas density and the interaction potential between the trapped and background gas particles.The particle loss rate from a trap is one of the primary observables for probing the collisional physics of trapped gases. Measurements of trap loss are routinely made in a variety of experiments to deduce elastic and inelastic collision cross sections for intratrap collisions and for collisions between trapped species and externally introduced particles. Trap depth often plays an important role in the interpretation of these measurements. A well-studied example of this is the large intensity-dependent variation displayed by the two-body intratrap loss-rate coefficient for atoms trapped in a magnetooptical trap (MOT). This variation results from an interplay of trap depth and the energy imparted to trapped atoms due to hyperfine or fine structure changing collisions, as well as radiative escape [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. More recently, inelastic and elastic collision rates in dipole traps have been of interest, particularly for metastable species [13,14]. The fraction of elastic collisions resulting in an evaporated atom depends on trap depth, which is a key parameter for evaporative cooling [13,15,16]. The lifetime dependence of a state-insenstive dipole trap on trap depth for cesium atoms has also recently been investigated [17]. Of course the most fundamental role of trap depth is that it be large enough to provide sufficient confinement, which has been an issue for experiments with buffer-gas-cooled atoms or molecules [18,19].In recent years there has been interest in making precision determinations of collision cross-sections from measurements of particle loss rates due to externally introduced particles. These measurements involve collisions of trapped neutral particles with neutral atoms and molecules [20][21][22][23][24], electron beams [25][26][27], and trapped ions [28][29][30]. Photoionization cross sections have also been investigated though mea...

We report on the observation of six large Feshbach resonances in a Fermi-Bose mixture of 6 Li and 85 Rb atoms. Near the resonances, both the elastic and inelastic collision rates are enhanced, and this results primarily in the loss of 6 Li from an optical dipole trap since it is less massive and less confined than its 85 Rb collision partner. We interpret our experimental data using a coupled-channels calculation which fully characterizes the ground-state scattering properties in any combination of spin states.

We study the dependence of the particle loading rate of a rubidium vapor cell magneto-optic trap (MOT). Using a trap depth determination of the MOT that relies on measurements of loss rates during optical excitation of colliding atoms to a repulsive molecular state, we experimentally determine the MOT escape velocity and show that the loading rate scales with escape velocity to the fourth power, or, equivalently, with the square of the trap depth. We also demonstrate that the loading rate is directly proportional to the background rubidium density. We thus experimentally confirm the loading rate model used in the literature since the invention of the MOT. In addition to confirming this long-standing conjecture, we show that the loading rate dependence can be used to reliably infer the trap depth and to tune the relative depth of a MOT (i.e., capture and escape velocities) when the background density is held fixed. The measurements have allowed an experimental determination of the relationship between capture and escape velocities in our MOTs of v c 1.290.12v e .

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