Abstract

We report on our progress towards realization of a toroidal trap for Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of ⁸⁷Rb using a time-averaged optical dipole potential. To achieve BEC we utilize a 20 W laser operating at 1064 nm to form an optical dipole trap in which we evaporatively cool the gas . Loading of the dipole trap is achieved by overlapping the dipole beams with a standard magnetic optical trap. Evaporative cooling is first performed in a single beam trap, followed by compression and additional confinement with a second orthogonal beam. This prevents stagnation of the evaporative cooling cycle, and allows the gain of 10⁵ in phase space density necessary to achieve quantum degeneracy.

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