On April 27, 2005, we observed a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in our lab. While not the first BEC in the world -- in fact there's already a BEC down the hall from us -- it has demonstrated the effectiveness of our hybrid approach to microfabricated traps. We have seen pure condensates with as many as 2×10⁵ atoms, unusually high for clouds evaporatively cooled in chip traps. The condensate is trapped and evaporated on a chip that measures only 16×28mm, but since we form our MOT using a 6-beam configuration (instead of a mirror MOT), we can capture 10⁹ Rb atoms in the MOT and fill the magnetic chip trap up to its trap-depth-limited capcity (about 3×10⁷).

For more information, see our web page announcement.