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Physical Review Letters

Slowing and cooling atoms in isotropic laser light

Wolfgang Ketterle, Alex Martin, Michael A. Joffe, David E. Pritchard

Published Oct 26, 1992• 76 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate cooling and slowing of atoms in isotropic laser light. As the atoms slow, they compensate for their changing Doppler shift by preferentially absorbing photons at a varying angle to their direction of motion, resulting in a continuous beam of slow atoms unperturbed by an intense slowing laser beam. We point out several novel features of slowing and cooling in isotropic light, and show that it can be superior to cooling with directed laser beams.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.69.2483

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We demonstrate cooling and slowing of atoms in isotropic laser light. As the atoms slow, they compensate for their changing Doppler shift by preferentially absorbing photons at a varying angle to their direction of motion, resulting in a continuous beam of slow atoms unperturbed by an intense slowing laser beam. We point out several novel features of slowing and cooling in isotropic light, and show that it can be superior to cooling with directed laser beams.
The interaction of laser radiation with matter is widely used to cool atomic and molecular gases to extremely low temperatures. In connection with this, a considerable number of works on quantum optics have recently been devoted to laser cooling of matter. The principle of Doppler cooling for neutral atoms was proposed by T. Nanch and A. Shavlov, and for trapped ions by D. Wineland and H. Dehmelt. The chapter shows the scheme of the principle of Doppler cooling. The atomic beam is slowed by transmission of a pulse that occurs at the time when the atom absorbs a quantum of light. When laser cooling of atoms in a certain volume, a problem arises with optical pumping. The scheme of cooling an atomic beam by laser radiation in a magnetic field, called the Zeeman slowing, is most often used to obtain slow atomic beams.
A discrete velocity model of the Boltzmann equation is established to investigate the effect of atomic beam slowing and cooling by means of laser light. Due to momentum transfer, caused by absorption and emission processes of photons, atoms are slowed. The Doppler effect, however, allows only selected atoms within a certain resonance range to interact with the laser field. To overcome this problem an external electric field is maintained. Semianalytical results of the velocity distribution as a function of the deceleration path of both ground level atoms and excited atoms are presented in detail and studied explicitly for various values of the laser intensity. A cooling limit is given and compared with quantum mechanical results.
To compensate the Doppler shift in the laser cooling process, two methods were developed:frequency chirping,1 which tunes the laser frequency rapidly, and a spatially varying magnetic field,2 which tunes The atomic energy level. An alternative approach is to use laser light with a continuous spectrum (white light).3,4 Using only a counterpropagating white-light beam will decelerate the atoms in the beam, hut it will not yield a large velocity compression.4,5 To achieve significant cooling, Hoffnagle5 proposed the use of an additional single-frequency laser beam, copropagating with the atomic beam, to counterbalance the nonresonant scattering force from the Lorentzian tail of the atomic transition.
We point out a laser cooling method for atoms, molecules, or ions at low saturation and large detuning from the particles' resonances. The moving particle modifies the field inside a cavity with a time delay characteristic of the cavity linewidth, while the field acts on the particle via the light shift. The dissipative mechanism can be interpreted as Doppler cooling based on preferential scattering rather than preferential absorption. It depends on particle properties only through the coherent scattering rate, opening new possibilities for optically cooling molecules or interacting atoms.
The concept of radiation-pressure cooling of atoms was independently suggested in 1975 for the case of a gas of neutral atoms by Hänsch and Schawlow, and for atomic ions bound in an electromagnetic trap by Wineland and Dehmelt. While the notion that momentum exchange from a photon moving in the opposite direction could slow an individual atom was well understood, until this time no one had come up with a means for producing an aggregate cooling of a larger ensemble of atoms (a gas). If all atoms in a hot gas absorb photons, then some will be heated and some cooled, and the ensuing equilibrium temperature is not lowered. The general feature of the cooling concepts is that a gas of atoms or ions can be cooled by ensuring that photon absorption takes place preferentially when the atoms or