Scaling laws for evaporative cooling in time-dependent optical traps - art. no. 051403

We derive scaling laws for the number of atoms, collision rate, and phase-s pace density as a function of trap depth for evaporative cooling in an adia badically lowered optical trap, The results are in excellent agreement with a Boltzmann equation model and show that very large increases in phase-spa ce density can be obtained without excessive slowing of the evaporation rat e. Predictions are in reasonable agreement with a recent experiment that ac hieves Bose-Einstein condensation by evaporation in an optical trap. We als o discuss evaporation of fermionic mixtures and explain why Pauli blocking does not strongly inhibit cooling.