Spin-3 dynamics study in a chromium Bose-Einstein Condensate

Dipole-dipole interactions are long-ranged and anisotropic. They induce a coupling between spin and angular momentum degrees of freedom yielding new interesting physics in the field of dilute quantum gases. We have thoroughly studied dipolar relaxation DR processes in a chromium BEC transferred into an excited magnetic m = +3 sublevel and loaded in 1D and 2D optical lattices. We demonstrate and quantify how the confinement of a quantum gas in optical lattices deeply modifies the DR processes. In particular, we show that DR is strongly inhibited at low magnetic fields when the released energy becomes smaller than the vibrational quantum of energy at the bottom of the lattice wells. We show that interband transitions are induced above the corresponding threshold and that metastability of the "excited state BEC" is reached below the 2D threshold.