85Rb tunable-interaction Bose-Einstein condensate machine

We describe our experimental setup for creating stable Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of R85b with tunable interparticle interactions. We use sympathetic cooling with R87b in two stages, initially in a tight Ioffe-Pritchard magnetic trap and subsequently in a weak, large-volume, crossed optical dipole trap, using the 155 G Feshbach resonance to manipulate the elastic and inelastic scattering properties of the R85b atoms. Typical R85b condensates contain 4×10⁴ atoms with a scattering length of a =+200a₀. Many aspects of the design presented here could be adapted to other dual-species BEC machines, including those involving degenerate Fermi-Bose mixtures. Our minimalist apparatus is well suited to experiments on dual-species and spinor Rb condensates, and has several simplifications over the R85b BEC machine at JILA, which we discuss at the end of this article.