All optical cooling of $^{39}$K to Bose Einstein condensation

Abstract

We report the all-optical production of Bose Einstein condensates (BEC) of $^{39}$K atoms. We directly load $3 \times 10^{7}$ atoms in a large volume optical dipole trap from gray molasses on the D1 transition. We then apply a small magnetic quadrupole field to polarize the sample before transferring the atoms in a tightly confining optical trap. Evaporative cooling is finally performed close to a Feshbach resonance to enhance the scattering length. Our setup allows to cross the BEC threshold with $3 \times 10^5$ atoms every 7s. As an illustration of the interest of the tunability of the interactions we study the expansion of Bose-Einstein condensates in the 1D to 3D crossover.