Abstract

The technique of evaporative cooling of magnetically trapped atoms was first applied to atomic hydrogen¹ and recently has been used very successfully on alkali atoms leading to Bose-Einstein condensation.² We have made a simulation of the forced evaporative cooling process using a classical Monte Carlo method.³ This powerful method is complementary to other recent studies of evaporative cooling¹ and does not need the assumption that a gas has recovered thermal equilibrium after each cut of potential well or the assumption of sufficient er- godicity.¹ Direct simulation by Bird's method can be done in any arbitrary potential and can be used to study the deviation between three components of translational temperature during forced evaporation.

© 1996 Optical Society of America