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Optics Letters

Proposal for continuous white-light cooling of an atomic beam

John A. Hoffnagle

Published Feb 1, 1988• 69 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Deceleration and cooling of an atomic beam by a counterpropagating beam of white light is studied by numerically integrating the classical equations of motion. It is shown that nonresonant scattering limits the cooling, but this limitation can be overcome by the addition of a monochromatic, copropagating light beam. Such a scheme can continuously cool about 70% of a thermal atomic beam to a temperature of the order of 50 mK.

DOI
10.1364/ol.13.000102

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Deceleration and cooling of an atomic beam by a counterpropagating beam of white light is studied by numerically integrating the classical equations of motion. It is shown that nonresonant scattering limits the cooling, but this limitation can be overcome by the addition of a monochromatic, copropagating light beam. Such a scheme can continuously cool about 70% of a thermal atomic beam to a temperature of the order of 50 mK.
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.
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.
We demonstrate slowing and longitudinal cooling of a supersonic beam of CaF molecules using counterpropagating laser light resonant with a closed rotational and almost-closed vibrational transition. A group of molecules are decelerated by about 20 m/s by applying light of a fixed frequency for 1.8 ms. Their velocity spread is reduced, corresponding to a final temperature of about 300 mK. The velocity is further reduced by chirping the frequency of the light to keep it in resonance as the molecules slow down.