Optical and evaporative cooling of caesium atoms in the gravito-optical surface trap

Abstract

We report on cooling of an atomic caesium gas closely above an evanescent-wave atom mirror. At high densities, optical cooling based on inelastic reflections is found to be limited by a density-dependent excess temperature and trap loss due to ultracold collisions involving repulsive molecular states. Nevertheless, very good starting conditions for subsequent evaporative cooling are obtained. Our first evaporation experiments show a temperature reduction from 10 μK down to 300 nK along with a gain in phase-space density of almost two orders of magnitude.