Final Activity Report Summary - CONT-BECS (Evaporative of a guided atomic beam: towards a continous Bose-Einstein condensate source.)
We have implemented this technique of evaporative cooling on a magnetically guided beam, resulting in a gain of one order of the on-axis phase space density, which constitutes a 'premiere' in the domain. It is important to emphasise that applying evaporative cooling on an atomic beam is significantly more difficult than on a trapped packet of atoms, since there is no longitudinal confinement which is responsible for the decrease of the dimensionality of evaporation as well as for the dilution of the atomic density. In order to overcome these limitations, we have also achieved a three-dimensional moving chain of magnetic traps to simultaneously trap and transport several packets of atoms at low speed and cool them down by evaporative cooling before releasing them into the magnetic guide to form a continuous atomic beam. All these achievements paved the way for the generation of a continuous and intense source of Bose-Einstein condensate.