Evaporative cooling of a small number of atoms in a single-beam microscopic dipole trap

Abstract : We demonstrate experimentally the evaporative cooling of a few hundred rubidium-87 atoms in a single-beam microscopic dipole trap. Starting with 800 atoms at a temperature of 125 μK, we produce an unpolarized sample of 40 atoms at 110 nK, within 3 s. The phase-space density at the end of the evaporation reaches unity, close to quantum degeneracy. The gain in phase-space density after evaporation is 10 3 . We find that the scaling laws used for much larger numbers of atoms are still valid despite the small number of atoms involved in the evaporative cooling process. We also compare our results to a simple kinetic model describing the evaporation process and find good agreement with the data.