Ultra-High Efficiency Magnetic Transport of ⁸⁷Rb Atoms in a Single Chamber Bose–Einstein Condensation Apparatus

We report the ultra-high efficiency transport of cold ⁸⁷Rb atoms using a moving magnetic quadrupole potential generated by three overlapping pairs of fixed coils. The transfer efficiency is better than 97%, which is the highest ever reported to our knowledge. The temperature increase due to heating is less than 10 μK when the initial cloud temperature is 110 μK. Our setup is similar to the magnetic transferring belt design Phys. Rev. A 63 (2001) 031401(R), although it is simpler because the push coil is not required. We use it to transport atoms away from a magneto-optical trap to very close to the wall of the glass cell, facilitating future experiments employing three-dimensional optical lattices, high resolution in-situ imaging, and magnetic Feshbach resonances.