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Journal of Optics

Standing waves, atoms, and very low temperatures

Claude N. Cohen-Tannoudji, William D. Phillips

Published Nov 1, 1991• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Momentum exchanges between atoms and standing waves have revealed unexpected effects of well known phenomena such as optical pumping and light shifts. One of the most enlightening results is cooling of atoms at a temperature of a few microkelvins.
DOI
10.1088/0150-536x/22/6/004

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When an atom or a molecule interacts with a light beam, the light emitted or absorbed carries valuable information about the atomic or molecular structure. This phenomenon underlies the whole field of spectroscopy. But the interaction of a photon with an atom can be used to manipulate the atom as well as to probe its structure. For example, in an approach called optical pumping, invented by Alfred Kastler, one can use the resonant exchange of angular momentum between atoms and polarized photons to align or orient the spins of atoms or to put them in nonequilibrium situations. In his original 1950 paper Kastler also proposed using optical pumping to cool and to heat the internal degrees of freedom, calling the phenomena the “effet luminofrigorique” and the “effet luminocalorique.” Another famous example of the use of photon-atom interaction to control atoms is laser cooling. This technique relies on resonant exchange of linear momentum between photons and atoms to control their external degrees of freedom and thus to reduce their kinetic energy. Laser cooling was suggested independently by Theodor Hänsch and Arthur Schawlow for neutral atoms and by David Wineland and Hans Dehmelt for trapped ions. In an article written three years ago for PHYSICS TODAY (June 1987, page 34), Wineland and Wayne Itano presented the principle of laser cooling and the potential applications of cold atoms to fields of physics such as ultrahigh resolution spectroscopy, atomic clocks, collisions, surface physics and collective quantum effects. At that time laser cooling had brought temperatures down to a few hundred microkelvin, but unexpected improvements during the last three years have dramatically lowered those temperatures to only a few microkelvin. We now feel we understand the new physical mechanisms responsible for these very low temperatures.
We have observed a new type of sub-Doppler laser cooling with neither polarization gradients nor magnetic fields. All known sub-Doppler laser cooling methods require one of these two to resdistribute the atomic population among the energy levels. This allows the irreversible processes of optical pumping vels. This allows the irreversible processes of optical pumping (OP) to manipulate the conservative force of light shifts (e.g. resonant exchange between the two beams comprising a standing wave) into a damping force. Our scheme employs stimulated Raman transitions between ground state hyperfine levels of Rb with a bichromatic standing wave, accompanied by a momentum change of {Delta}p = 2{h_bar}k. OP, with {Delta}p = 1{h_bar}k, creates a population imbalance allowing repetition of the Raman process. When the detuning of the light from Raman resonance {delta} is properly chosen, the net momentum exchange damps the atomic motion. Changing {delta} by only {gamma}/6(1 MHz) replaces cooling by heating. This process separates the velocity selective Raman resonance and OP processes differently from others, and helps clarify the role of these different mechanisms.
The cover picture shows strontium atoms which are laser cooled to a microkelvin temperature and held in an optical lattice trap. The trap consists of a series of microtraps at the antinodes of the optical standing wave. The intense blue light in the background is the fluorescence of the atoms when they are laser cooled or detected. The clock transition is in red. In their Concept article Zelevinsky et al. (page 375) show that an ultrastable laser recovers a high-resolution spectrum of the narrow, forbidden optical clock transition with a linewidth of 2 Hz. Spectroscopy is performed without recoil shifts, Doppler effects, or ac Stark shifts from the trapping light.