Exciting collective oscillations in a trapped 1D gas -: art. no. 250402

We report on the realization of a trapped one-dimensional Bose gas and its characterization by means of measuring its lowest lying collective excitations. The quantum degenerate Bose gas is prepared in a 2D optical lattice, and we find the ratio of the frequencies of the lowest compressional (breathing) mode and the dipole mode to be (omega(B)/omega(D))(2)similar or equal to3.1, in accordance with the Lieb-Liniger and mean-field theory. For a thermal gas we measure (omega(B)/omega(D))(2)similar or equal to4. By heating the quantum degenerate gas, we have studied the transition between the two regimes. For the lowest number of particles attainable in the experiment the kinetic energy of the system is similar to the interaction energy, and we enter the strongly interacting regime.