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Phys. Rev. A 53, R1 - R4 (1996)

Ballistic expansion of trapped thermal atoms

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L. You
Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, MS 14, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

M. Holland
JILA and Department of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0440

Rapid Communication Received 14 September 1995; revised 30 October 1995

We study the time evolution of the distribution function for an ensemble of classical particles in a harmonic trap when the oscillation frequencies are varied with time. We compare our results with the near circular density distributions observed for the thermal part of the expanded cloud in a recent experiment demonstrating the Bose-Einstein condensation of an alkali-metal vapor. The shape and extent of this noncondensed component characterize the temperature of the original cloud.


©1996 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.53.R1
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.53.R1
PACS: 03.75.Fi

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