Laser cooling and trapping ; techniques

Jean-Louis Basdevant, Jean Dalibard

Jürgen Eschner, Giovanna Morigi, Ferdinand Schmidt‐Kaler +1 more

Trapped and laser-cooled ions are increasingly used for a variety of modern high-precision experiments, for frequency standard applications, and for quantum information processing. Therefore laser cooling of trapped ions is reviewed, the current state of the art is reported, and several new cooling techniques are outlined. The principles of ion trapping and the basic concepts of laser cooling for trapped atoms are introduced. The underlying physical mechanisms are presented, and basic experiments are briefly sketched. Particular attention is paid to recent progress by elucidating several milestone experiments. In addition, a number of special cooling techniques pertaining to trapped ions are reviewed; open questions and future research lines are indicated.

Zongze Li

As a matter of fact, the laser cooling and trapping has already been widely used in various fields in advanced atoms controlling. With this in mind, this study gives a systematical analysis of the principle of laser cooling and trapping, and the development of them in the recent years. To be specific, this study will discuss the applications that has invented in the recent year based on the laser colling and trapping (especially for the state-of-art facilities), and makes a comparison between the concepts of laser cooling and laser trapping accordingly. Then, based on the analysis and evaluations, the limitations of laser cooling and laser trapping have been shown, and the future outlooks are also claimed and demonstrated as well. To sum up, the study concludes by discussing the limitations of these techniques, and gives some methods to solve these issues. Overall, these results shed light on guiding further exploration of laser cooling and trapping.

Charles S. Adams, Ifan G. Hughes

Steven Chu

The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce the listener to the rapidly developing field of laser cooling and trapping. Doppler cooling is first discussed followed by the new mechanism of cooling based on ground-state energy level shifts in light fields with polarization gradients. Next, the basic concepts of magnetic traps, optical dipole force traps (optical tweezers), and the magnetooptic trap are considered. Selected uses of these traps and cooling techniques are given to elucidate the broad utility of these techniques.