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arXiv:1803.05108 · Chinese Physics Letters

Sub-Doppler Laser Cooling of23Na in Gray Molasses on theD2Line

Zhenlian Shi, Ziliang Li, Pengjun Wang, Zengming Meng, Lianghui Huang, Jing Zhang

Published Dec 1, 2018• 15 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report on the efficient gray molasses cooling of sodium atoms using the D 2 optical transition at 589.1 nm. Thanks to the hyperfine split about 6 Γ between | F ′ = 2 ⟩ and | F ′ = 3 ⟩ in the excited state 3 2 P 3 / 2 , this atomic transition is effective for the gray molasses cooling mechanism. Using this cooling technique, the atomic sample in F = 2 ground manifold is cooled from 700 μ K to 56 μ K in 3.5 ms. We observe that the loading efficiency into magnetic trap is increased due to the lower temperature and high phase space density of atomic cloud after gray molasses. This technique offers a promising route for the fast cooling of the sodium atoms in the F = 2 state .

DOI
10.1088/0256-307x/35/12/123701

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We report on the efficient gray molasses cooling of sodium atoms using the D 2 optical transition at 589.1 nm. Thanks to the hyperfine split about 6 Γ between | F ′ = 2 ⟩ and | F ′ = 3 ⟩ in the excited state 3 2 P 3 / 2 , this atomic transition is effective for the gray molasses cooling mechanism. Using this cooling technique, the atomic sample in F = 2 ground manifold is cooled from 700 μ K to 56 μ K in 3.5 ms. We observe that the loading efficiency into magnetic trap is increased due to the lower temperature and high phase space density of atomic cloud after gray molasses. This technique offers a promising route for the fast cooling of the sodium atoms in the F = 2 state .
We report on the realization of sub-Doppler laser cooling of sodium atoms in gray molasses using the D1{D}_{1}D1​ optical transition $(3s\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}^{2}S_{1/2}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}3p\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}^{2}P_{1/2})$ at 589.8 nm. The technique is applied to samples containing $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{9}$ atoms, previously cooled to $350\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{K}$ in a magneto-optical trap, and it leads to temperatures as low as $9\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{K}$ and phase-space densities in the range of ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$. The capture efficiency of the gray molasses is larger than 2/3, and we observe no density-dependent heating for densities up to ${10}^{11}\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}{\mathrm{cm}}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$.
We report on the production of Bose–Einstein condensates of sodium atoms in the hyperfine state | F = 2 , m F = 2 ⟩ in a crossed optical dipole trap using D 2 gray molasses. We use the gray molasses sub-Doppler cooling technique to obtain an atomic sample of 3 × 10 8 at 56 µK. After the radio frequency (RF) evaporation cooling in an optically plugged magnetic trap, we transfer the atoms sample of 2.5 × 10 6 at 5.7 µK to a crossed optical dipole trap where a pure condensate with an atom number of 2 × 10 5 and lifetime of 6.3 s is obtained by further evaporation. We compare the cooling process of sodium atoms in the | 2 , 2 ⟩ and the | 1 , 1 ⟩ states by evaporation in the optical trap, and also observe the different three-body loss rates by the lifetime measurement.
Sub-Doppler laser cooling of40K with Raman gray molasses on the D2{D}_{2}D2​ line
Gray molasses is a powerful tool for sub-Doppler laser cooling of atoms to low temperatures. For alkaline atoms, this technique is commonly implemented with cooling lasers which are blue-detuned from either the D 1 or D 2 line. Here we show that efficient gray molasses can be implemented on the D 2 line of 40 K with red -detuned lasers. We obtained temperatures of , which enables direct loading of atoms from a magneto-optical trap into an optical dipole trap. We support our findings by a one-dimensional model and three-dimensional numerical simulations of the optical Bloch equations which qualitatively reproduce the experimentally observed cooling effects.
Alkali-metal atoms are the foremost candidates for studies of degenerate quantum gases employing sub-Doppler cooling techniques operating either on the D1 or D2 transition. However, the case of 39K atoms has a narrow excited-state structure of the D2 transition compromising difficulty to achieve below the Doppler limit temperature (TD = hΓ/2kB = 140μK) by employing conventional cooling techniques such as optical molasses or polarization gradient cooling on this transition. In this work, a sub-Doppler cooling known as Gray molasses operating on the ¦42S½} → ¦42P½} 770nm transition D1 is applied to cool a cloud of 39K atoms to sub-Doppler temperatures, which is an important step to reach the quantum degeneracy of the quantum gases. With this approach we reach temperatures below the Doppler limit around 14.3μK by the formation of dark states using the cooling and repumping lasers detuned to the blue side at the Raman resonance (two-photon) in Λ configuration. Then, we ramp down the intensities of each laser beam, in order to cool the atoms to an ultra-low temperature of 8.62μK, getting closer to the photon recoil limit of (Tr = h2k2L/2mkB = 0.4μK). In our results, we present a study of the behaviour of the temperature and the number of atoms by the influence of the relative detuning, and also a particular analysis of the temperature by the influence of the global detuning. In the following, we present the lowest temperature as a function of the final intensities D1 molasses. Finally, we compare the performance of our Gray molasses cloud with other works by using a phase space density analysis.
Following the bichromatic sub-Doppler cooling scheme on the D1-line of 40K recently demonstrated in (Fernandes et al. 2012), we introduce a similar technique for 7Li atoms and obtain temperatures of 60 uK while capturing all of the 5x10^8 atoms present from the previous stage. We investigate the influence of the detuning between the the two cooling frequencies and observe a threefold decrease of the temperature when the Raman condition is fulfilled. We interpret this effect as arising from extra cooling due to long-lived coherences between hyperfine states. Solving the optical Bloch equations for a simplified, \Lambda-type three-level system we identify the presence of an efficient cooling force near the Raman condition. After transfer into a quadrupole magnetic trap, we measure a phase space density of ~10^-5. This laser cooling offers a promising route for fast evaporation of lithium atoms to quantum degeneracy in optical or magnetic traps.