We report on a highly efficient evaporative cooling optimized experimentally. We successfully created sodium Bose-Einstein condensates with 6.4×10${}^7$ atoms starting from 6.6×10${}^9$ thermal atoms trapped in a magnetic trap by employing a fast linear sweep of radio frequency at the final stage of evaporative cooling so as to overcome the serious three-body losses. The experimental results such as the cooling trajectory and the condensate growth quantitatively agree with the numerical simulations of evaporative cooling on the basis of the kinetic theory of a Bose gas carefully taking into account our specific experimental conditions. We further discuss theoretically a possibility of producing large condensates, more than 10${}^8$ sodium atoms, by simply increasing the number of initial thermal trapped atoms and the corresponding optimization of evaporative cooling.

• Received 24 February 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.84.033626