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Q: Quantenoptik

Q 6: Atom Optics II

Q 6.2: Talk

Monday, April 2, 2001, 17:45–18:00, H 104

Photoassociation in a Sodium Bose-Einstein Condensate — •H. Häffner, A. Browaeys, J. Denschlag, F. Fatemi, K. Jones, C. McKenzie, J. Simsarian, H. Cho, K. Helmerson, P. Lett, S. Rolston, and W.D. Phillips — National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA

We will report on photoassociation experiments in a sodium Bose-Einstein condensate. We photoassociate condensed atoms to an electronically excited molecular state, which decays within about 10 ns into either a ground state molecule or into a pair of atoms with high relative momentum. Both decay processes lead to an observable loss of atoms in the condensate. As a first step we have studied the rate of molecule formation and the width of the photoassociation resonance in the presence of a single laser beam. We are investigating the use of photoassociation to study depletion of the pair correlation function of the condensate.