Abstract

Evaporative cooling and Bose-Einstein condensation recently has been the subject of considerable interest.^1,2 However there are some very interesting questions remaining to be answered. For example, when the phase space density of a gas is in quantum degenerate regime, does the condensation take place instaneously or not? And how can one speed up condensation? These questions cannot simply be answered by experiments, and most of theoretical publications have been devoted to study the properties of the condensate itself. Only a little work has been done on the dynamical process for a non-seeded trapped thermal gas evolving into a macroscopic quantum object.³

© 1997 Optical Society of America