A new preprint from the Schmiedmayer group: arXiv:1101.4206

Absorption Imaging of Ultracold Atoms on Atom Chips
David A. Smith, Simon Aigner, Sebastian Hofferberth, Michael Gring, Mauritz Andersson, Stefan Wildermuth, Peter Krüger, Stephan Schneider, Thorsten Schumm, Jörg Schmiedmayer
arXiv:1101.4206

We have made our first mirror MOT of fermionic potassium!  It is very tiny for the moment, but we now know that it works!  Our apparatus is a two-chamber setup where a near-resonant beam pushes atoms from a 3D MOT in a collection chamber (housing potassium dispensers) to a “science” chamber containing an atom chip.  […]

We have observed matter-wave interference for the first time on our experiment! After creating a Rb87 BEC in a static magnetic trap, we used radio-frequency fields to create a  dressed-state double-well potential, “splitting” the BEC into two.  We then switched off the trapping potential and allowed the two halves to fall under gravity for 18 […]

We have produced our first BEC using the atom chip in our experiment! (we had previously made a BEC using a macroscopic copper structure situated underneath the chip) The atom chip trapping wire is 100 micrometres wide and 2.5 micrometres high, carrying  a current of 800 mA.  The Rb87 BEC has approximately 100,000 atoms.

We have now created our first BEC on our new experimental setup. The BEC was created in a trap formed by a (macroscopic) copper Z structure that lies beneath the atom chip.

We have now loaded (rubidium-87) atoms into our new atom chip trap in the KRb lab for the first time.