Abstract

Much of the interest in Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of dilute gases is due to the fact that the interactions between condensate atoms are weak enough to be treated perturbatively. Nonetheless, interactions strongly affect the characteristics of the condensate, allowing quantum many-body effects to be studied in detail. The case of ⁷Li atoms is especially interesting because the interactions are attractive, which limits the number of condensate atoms N₀ to a value N_0max. In our case, N_0mxx is ~1400 atoms, and we have experimentally verified that n₀ is always less than this value.¹

© 1998 Optical Society of America