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Journal of the Optical Society of America B

Large-angle beam deflection of a laser-cooled sodium beam

J. Nellessen, Jörg Helge Müller, K. Sengstock, Wolfgang A. Ertmer

Published Nov 1, 1989• 41 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A sodium atomic beam has been decelerated and laser cooled to a longitudinal beam temperature of less than 30 mK. Subsequently these slow atoms with a typical velocity of 100 m/sec were selectively deflected by laser-light forces. The deflection angle was typically 30°. The deflection scheme permits a stabilization of the transverse velocities in the deflected atomic beam down to the quantum-limit temperature for one dimension (0.7 × 240 μK). The experimentally achieved temperatures are of the order of 1 mK.

DOI
10.1364/josab.6.002149

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A sodium atomic beam has been decelerated and laser cooled to a longitudinal beam temperature of less than 30 mK. Subsequently these slow atoms with a typical velocity of 100 m/sec were selectively deflected by laser-light forces. The deflection angle was typically 30°. The deflection scheme permits a stabilization of the transverse velocities in the deflected atomic beam down to the quantum-limit temperature for one dimension (0.7 × 240 μK). The experimentally achieved temperatures are of the order of 1 mK.
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Atomic-beam sodium atoms were slowed to zero or negative velocities by counterpropagating laser radiation which was frequency chirped with precise electro-optic modulation techniques. The resulting "gas cloud" had a temperature below 50 mK and a density above 106{10}^{6}106 atoms/cm3{\mathrm{cm}}^{3}cm3. We mention future possibilities in atom slowing, deflection, and storage.
We have developed a slow, highly collimated, and bright sodium atom beam suitable for orientation and alignment studies in cold collisions. A combination of transverse-optical collimation, longitudinal cooling, rapid decoupling from the longitudinal cooling cycle, and a final “optical-force extrusion” stage produces an atom density of 1×1010 cm−3 within a beam-divergence solid angle of 2×10−6 sr. Rapid Zeeman-cooler decoupling results in a narrow laboratory velocity distribution of 5 m/s full width at half maximum and a cold binary intrabeam collision temperature of 4 mK.