Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Laser cool and trap trace noble atoms

Mingdong Wang, Yanji Hong, Gaoping Feng

Published Jan 26, 2016• 1 citation

Abstract

Laser can be used to cool and manipulate neutron atoms via momentum exchange between photons and atoms. Laser cooling and trapping is well established on alkali, alkali earth, and noble gas elements. Noble gases, with stable physical and chemical properties, no reactions with other elements, have great potential uses in cold collision, spectroscopy measurement, photo-association, atom optics, etc. However, trapping noble gas atoms is generally more difficult because of the lack of suitable UV lasers. Some of these problems will be overcome with future advances in UV laser technology. Excited by electron collisions, noble gas can reach the long life metastable state for the use of laser decelerating, focusing and trapping. In this paper some main methods which are used to achieve cooling and trapping metastable noble gas atoms are discussed.

DOI: 10.1117/12.2229571

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