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APS » Journals » Phys. Rev. Lett. » Volume 86 » Issue 16
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 3459–3462 (2001)

Bose-Einstein Condensation of Metastable Helium

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F. Pereira Dos Santos, J. Léonard, Junmin Wang*, C. J. Barrelet, F. Perales†, E. Rasel‡, C. S. Unnikrishnan§, M. Leduc, and C. Cohen-Tannoudji
Collège de France, Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Département de Physique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France

Received 19 March 2001; published in the issue dated 16 April 2001

We have observed a Bose-Einstein condensate in a dilute gas of 4He in the 32S1 metastable state. We find a critical temperature of (4.7±0.5)μK and a typical number of atoms at the threshold of 8×106. The maximum number of atoms in our condensate is about 5×105. An approximate value for the scattering length a = (16±8)nm is measured. The mean elastic collision rate at threshold is then estimated to be about 2×104s-1, indicating that we are deeply in the hydrodynamic regime. The typical decay time of the condensate is 2s, which places an upper bound on the rate constants for two-body and three-body inelastic collisions.

© 2001 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.3459
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.3459
PACS:
03.75.Fi, 05.30.Jp, 32.80.Pj

*Permanent address: Institute of Opto-Electronics, Shanxi University, 36 Wucheng Road, Taiyuan, Shanxi 030006, China.

†Permanent address: Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers, UMR 7538 du CNRS, Université Paris Nord, Avenue J. B. Clément, 93430 Villetaneuse, France.

‡Present address: Universität Hannover, Welfengarten 1, D-30167 Hannover, Germany.

§Permanent address: TIFR, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai 400005, India.

 
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