Depolarisation cooling of an atomic cloud

5. Physikalisches Institut, Universität Stuttgart Pfaffenwaldring 57, 70550 Stuttgart, Germany

Received: 9 May 2005
Accepted: 19 July 2005

Abstract

We propose a cooling scheme based on depolarisation of a polarised cloud of trapped atoms. Similar to adiabatic demagnetisation, we suggest to use the coupling between the internal spin reservoir of the cloud and the external kinetic reservoir via dipolar relaxation to reduce the temperature of the cloud. By optical pumping one can cool the spin reservoir and force the cooling process. In case of a trapped gas of dipolar chromium atoms, we show that this cooling technique can be performed continuously and used to approach the critical phase space density for BEC.