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Physical Review A

Cold atomic media with ultrahigh optical depths

Ya-Fen Hsiao, Hung-Shiue Chen, Pin-Ju Tsai, Ying-Cheng Chen

Published Nov 5, 2014• 53 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present an experimental study to achieve ultrahigh optical depths for cold atomic media with a two-dimensional magneto-optical trap (MOT) of cesium. By combining large atom number, a temporally dark and compressed MOT, and Zeeman-state optical pumping, we achieve an optical depth of up to 1306 for the open transition of the cesium ${D}_{1}$ line. Our work demonstrates that it is feasible to push the optical depth up to the 1000 level with a convenient MOT setup. This development paves the way to many important proposals in quantum optics and many-body physics.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.90.055401

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