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Laser cooling of rare gases in metastable states

Fujio Shimizu, Kazuko Shimizu, Hiroshi Takuma

Published Jul 18, 1988• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We report in this talk the first demonstration of the laser cooling of a metastatic atomic bean, and the transfer of cooled atoms between two different metastatic states. The laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms have been demonstrated only on alkali atoms. It is of great interest to extend this technique to other atomic species. The standard cooling scheme for those atoms uses the ground state as the lower energy level of the cooling transition. The cooling transtion must have a sizable transition moment and its wavelength must be in the region where a continuous laser is available. Such an excited level can generally be found in alkali, alkali earths. For many transition and rare-earth metals, an adequate excited level can be found only in relatively high excited states.

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We report in this talk the first demonstration of the laser cooling of a metastatic atomic bean, and the transfer of cooled atoms between two different metastatic states. The laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms have been demonstrated only on alkali atoms. It is of great interest to extend this technique to other atomic species. The standard cooling scheme for those atoms uses the ground state as the lower energy level of the cooling transition. The cooling transtion must have a sizable transition moment and its wavelength must be in the region where a continuous laser is available. Such an excited level can generally be found in alkali, alkali earths. For many transition and rare-earth metals, an adequate excited level can be found only in relatively high excited states.
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.
Despite the prominent role of laser cooling in modern atomic physics, with applications ranging from quantum sensors to high-precision spectroscopy and ultracold chemistry, laser cooling techniques are still limited to atoms with simple energy level structure and closed transitions that are accessible by currently available continuous wave (cw) laser sources. Two main obstacles prevent the extension of laser cooling techniques to a variety of atomic species and molecules. The first is associated with technical difficulties in creating cw laser light in the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) spectral range - the absence of those laser sources prevents laser cooling of simple atoms such as hydrogen, deuterium, and antihydrogen. The second obstacle is associated with complex energy level structure of many atoms and almost all molecules - it permits decay of an excited state into a number of lower-lying states that can be widely separated in energy, which makes laser cooling of such species inefficient and experimentally very challenging.
Optically pumped alkali vapor lasers are currently being developed in several laboratories. The objective is to construct high-powered lasers that also exhibit excellent beam quality. Considerable progress has been made, but there are technical challenges associated with the reactivity of the metal atoms. Rare gas atoms (Rg) excited to the np(5)(n+1)s (3)P(2) configuration are metastable and have spectral properties that are closely similar to those of the alkali metals. In principle, optically pumped lasers could be constructed using excitation of the np(5)(n+1)p←np(5)(n+1)s transitions. We have demonstrated this potential by observing gain and lasing for optically pumped Ar(*), Kr(*) and Xe(*). Three-level lasing schemes were used, with He or Ar as the collisional energy transfer agent that established the population inversion. These laser systems have the advantage of using inert reagents that are gases at room temperature.
During the last decades the study of cold atoms has grown in a great measure. Research in this field has been made possible due to the development of laser cooling and trapping techniques. We use laser cooling to cool helium atoms down to a temperature of 1 mK and we are able to trap 106 atoms in our magneto-optical trap. The helium atoms are in a metastable state, the He 23S1 state, which has a lifetime of more than 2 hours. With cold atoms phenomena can be studied that are not accessible using thermal atoms, such as high resolution spectroscopy. Furthermore cold atoms are the first step towards Bose-Einstein condensation. Cold alkali-metal atoms have been extensively studied, using photoassociation spectroscopy. In this thesis the first photoassociation results for rare gas atoms, namely metastable helium atoms will be discussed. Various experiments are described and an analysis of the results is given.
The possibility of laser cooling of alkaline-earth-metal atoms and ytterbium atoms using a two-photon transition is analyzed. We consider a ${}^{1}{S}_{0}{\ensuremath{-}}^{1}{S}_{0}$ transition with excitation in near resonance with the 1P1{}^{1}{P}_{1}1P1​ level. This greatly increases the two-photon transition rate, allowing an effective transfer of momentum. The experimental implementation of this technique is discussed and we show that for calcium, for example, two-photon cooling can be used to achieve a Doppler limit of $123\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{K}.$ The efficiency of this cooling scheme and the main loss mechanisms are analyzed.