TY - JOUR T1 - Optimization of collisional Feshbach cooling of an ultracold nondegenerate gas JF - Physical Review A Y1 - 2015 A1 - Marlon Nuske A1 - Eite Tiesinga A1 - L. Mathey AB - We optimize a collision-induced cooling process for ultracold atoms in the nondegenerate regime. It makes use of a Feshbach resonance, instead of rf radiation in evaporative cooling, to selectively expel hot atoms from a trap. Using functional minimization we analytically show that for the optimal cooling process the resonance energy must be tuned such that it linearly follows the temperature. Here, optimal cooling is defined as maximizing the phase-space density after a fixed cooling duration. The analytical results are confirmed by numerical Monte-Carlo simulations. In order to simulate more realistic experimental conditions, we show that background losses do not change our conclusions, while additional non-resonant two-body losses make a lower initial resonance energy with non-linear dependence on temperature preferable. VL - 91 U4 - 043626 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8473v1 CP - 4 J1 - Phys. Rev. A U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevA.91.043626 ER -