Laser cooling and trapping of noble gas atoms

Mingdong Wang, Yanji Hong, Gaoping Feng

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.

Curtis C. Bradley, Randall G. Hulet

Fujio Shimizu

Cheng Cun-Feng, Yang Guo-Min, Wei Jiang +5 more

Metastable noble gas atomic beam is widely used in atomic and molecular physics studies.Using radio-frequency discharge and transverse laser cooling, we produced a well-collimated intense meta-stable Krypton beam.Numerical simulation is also used to analyze the trajectories of atoms in an optic field produced by transverse cooling laser beams.The charactersisticl of the atomic beam are determined by measuring the laser induced fluorescence.The atomic beam flux measured at 230 cm downstream is 1.61016 atoms/(s*sr), which is enhanced by two orders of magnitude.The Kr atoms are finally trapped in a magneto-optic trap.A total of 1.31010 meta-stable 84Kr atoms can be simultaneously trapped with a loading rate of 3.01011 atoms/s.The same setup is also successfully used to obtain a bright metastable atomic argon beam and trap.

Charles S. Adams, Erling Riis

Ulrich Vogl, Anne Saβ, Martin Weitz

We describe experiments on the laser cooling of both helium-rubidium and argon-rubidium gas mixtures by collisional redistribution of radiation. Frequent alkali-noble gas collisions in the ultradense gas, with typically 200 bar of noble buffer gas pressure, shift a highly red detuned optical beam into resonance with a rubidium Dline transition, while spontaneous decay occurs close to the unshifted atomic resonance frequency. The technique allows for the laser cooling of macroscopic ensembles of gas atoms. The use of helium as a buffer gas leads to smaller temperature changes within the gas volume due to the high thermal conductivity of this buffer gas, as compared to the heavier argon noble gas, while the heat transfer within the cell is improved.