While the first observation of Bose-Einstein condensation was made in a magnetic atom trap using RF driven evaporative cooling, optical dipole traps are now much more common platforms for achieving condensation. Beginning in a MOT, cold, trapped atoms are transferred to the focal point of a high power, tightly focused, off-resonant laser beam. The electric field of the laser at its focus is sufficiently strong to induce dipole moments in the atoms, which are then attracted to the electric field maximum at the laser focus, effectively creating a trapping potential to hold them at the beam focus.
The depth of the optical trapping potential in an optical dipole trap (ODT) is proportional to the intensity of the trapping laser light. Decreasing the power in the trapping laser beam therefore decreases the depth of the trapping potential. In the case of RF-driven evaporation, the actual height of the potential barrier confining the atoms is fixed during the evaporation sequence, but the RF knife effectively decreases the depth of this barrier, as previously discussed. For an optical trap, however, evaporation is facilitated by decreasing the laser power and thus lowering the depth of the trapping potential. As a result, the warmest atoms in the trap will have sufficient kinetic energy to be able to make it over the barrier walls and escape the trap, reducing the average energy of the remaining atoms as previously described. While trap depths for ODTs can be shallow (on the order of mK, in terms of temperature), the simplicity of this optical evaporation procedure has helped to make it increasingly popular for BEC experiments since its first demonstrations shortly after magnetic BEC production.