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Laser Physics

Single-photon atomic cooling

Gabriel Price, Stephen Travis Bannerman, Edvardas Narevicius, Mark G. Raizen

Published Jul 1, 2007• 23 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We propose a new method of cooling and phase space compression that requires each atom to scatter only one photon. We consider the specific example of rubidium-87 atoms confined to a magnetic trap and provide realistic estimates. Beyond a demonstration in atomic rubidium, this method could enable cooling of atoms and molecules that do not have cycling transitions.

DOI
10.1134/s1054660x07070109

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•Aug 1, 2008•0 citations
We propose a new method of cooling and phase space compression that requires each atom to scatter only one photon. We consider the specific example of rubidium-87 atoms confined to a magnetic trap and provide realistic estimates. Beyond a demonstration in atomic rubidium, this method could enable cooling of atoms and molecules that do not have cycling transitions.
We propose a general method to cool the translational motion of molecules. Our method is an extension of single photon atomic cooling which was successfully implemented in our laboratory. Requiring a single event of absorption followed by a spontaneous emission, this method circumvents the need for a cycling transition and can be applied to any paramagnetic or polar molecule. In our approach, trapped molecules would be captured near their classical turning points in an optical dipole or RF-trap following an irreversible transition process.
Abstract All conventional methods to laser-cool atoms rely on repeated cycles of optical pumping and spontaneous emission of a photon by the atom. Spontaneous emission in a random direction provides the dissipative mechanism required to remove entropy from the atom. However, alternative cooling methods have been proposed1, 2 for a single atom strongly coupled to a high-finesse cavity; the role of spontaneous emission is replaced by the escape of a photon from the cavity. Application of such cooling schemes would improve the performance of atom–cavity systems for quantum information processing3, 4. Furthermore, as cavity cooling does not rely on spontaneous emission, it can be applied to systems that cannot be laser-cooled by conventional methods; these include molecules2 (which do not have a closed transition) and collective excitations of Bose condensates5, which are destroyed by randomly directed recoil kicks. Here we demonstrate cavity cooling of single rubidium atoms stored in an intracavity dipole trap. The cooling mechanism results in extended storage times and improved localization of atoms. We estimate that the observed cooling rate is at least five times larger than that produced by free-space cooling methods, for comparable excitation of the atom.
Researchers have been pushing atoms around with laser beams for many years, cooling them to record low temperatures and capturing them in confined spaces. Most such efforts require many photons. The field of a single photon is not generally strong enough to corral an atom—unless, that is, the light field is enhanced by confinement within a tiny cavity and the atom enters at a crawl. Then the coupling energy of the atom to the field can exceed the atom's kinetic energy, and the atom can become ensnared. A group from Caltech and the University of Auckland, and also a group at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, recently created the required conditions by combining cavity quantum electrodynamics with laser trapping and cooling; both groups succeeded in confining single atoms within optical cavities with an average of one photon in the cavity.
We demonstrate a general and efficient informational cooling technique for atoms that is an experimental realization of a one-dimensional Maxwell's demon. The technique transfers atoms from a magnetic trap into an optical trap via a single spontaneous Raman transition that is discriminatively driven near each atom's classical turning point. In this way, nearly all of the atomic ensemble's kinetic energy in one dimension is removed. We develop a simple analytical model to predict the efficiency of transfer between the traps and provide evidence that the performance is limited only by particle dynamics in the magnetic trap. Transfer efficiencies up to 2.2% are reported. We show that efficiency can be traded for phase-space compression, and we report compression up to a factor of 350. Our results represent a 15-fold improvement over our previous demonstration of the cooling technique.
Established optical cooling methods, employed in such traps as magneto-optical traps and optical molasses, work by means of a closed optical transition involving the absorption and spontaneous emission of large numbers of photons by each atom. This technique, therefore, cannot be extended to species-such as molecules-which, in general, do not have closed optical transitions. Finally, the lack of any requirement for having a closed optical transition implies that this method for cooling atoms may also be applicable to cooling molecules.