Interacting Rubidium and Caesium Atoms

Binary mixtures of ultracold atoms are of great interest in the research field of quantum optics and are studied by several groups aiming at different applications. This paper works with rubidium and caesium, which are simultaneously stored in a magnetic trap. Species-selective microwave cooling is used on the rubidium groundstate hyperfine transition. Caesium is sympathetically cooled via elastic collisions with rubidium. When cooling down the mixture to temperatures below 1 muK, below 4 muK we observe strong losses of caesium. Analysing the dynamics of sympathetic cooling, lower limit for the modulus of the rubidium-caesium triplet s-wave scattering length is estimated.