Cooling a Bose Gas by Three-Body Losses

We report the demonstration of cooling by three-body losses in a Bose gas. We use a harmonically confined one-dimensional (1D) Bose gas in the quasicondensate regime and, as the atom number decreases under the effect of three-body losses, the temperature T drops up to a factor of 4. The ratio k_{B}T/(mc^{2}) stays close to 0.64, where m is the atomic mass and c the speed of sound in the trap center. The dimensionless 1D interaction parameter γ, evaluated at the trap center, spans more than 2 orders of magnitudes over the different sets of data. We present a theoretical analysis for a homogeneous 1D gas in the quasicondensate regime, which predicts that the ratio k_{B}T/(mc^{2}) converges towards 0.6 under the effect of three-body losses. More sophisticated theoretical predictions that take into account the longitudinal harmonic confinement and transverse effects are in agreement within 30% with experimental data.