Abstract
Radiofrequency (RF)-dressed potentials are a promising technique for manipulating atomic mixtures, but so far little work has been undertaken to understand the collisions of atoms held within these traps. In this work, we dress a mixture of 85Rb and 87Rb with RF radiation, characterize the inelastic loss that occurs, and demonstrate species-selective manipulations. Our measurements show the loss is caused by two-body 87Rb+85Rb collisions, and we show the inelastic rate coefficient varies with detuning from the RF resonance. We explain our observations using quantum scattering calculations, which give reasonable agreement with the measurements. The calculations consider magnetic fields both perpendicular to the plane of RF polarization and tilted with respect to it. Our findings have important consequences for future experiments that dress mixtures with RF fields.
Highlights
Radiofrequency -dressed potentials are a promising technique for manipulating atomic mixtures, but so far little work has been undertaken to understand the collisions of atoms held within these traps
Our measurements show the loss is caused by two-body 87Rb + 85Rb collisions, and we show the inelastic rate coefficient varies with detuning from the rf resonance
We have investigated the inelastic collisions that occur in an rf-dressed mixture of 85Rb and 87Rb
Summary
We consider rubidium atoms in their ground electronic state. In a static magnetic field B0 along the z axis, the Hamiltonian for each atom is. At the low magnetic fields considered here, each atomic state splits into substates with a well-defined projection m f of the total angular momentum f along B0. In this regime, f is nearly conserved but the individual projections ms and mi of s and i are not. In addition to the static magnetic field, we consider a rf field with angular frequency ω that is σ− polarized about the z axis, with Brf(t ) = Brf[ex cos ωt − ey sin ωt ]. Atoms in states for which m > 0 may be trapped in the resulting potential minimum [9,10]
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