Special Lecture: Cooling and Trapping of Atoms with Laser Light

William D. Phillips

Steven Chu, John E. Bjorkholm, Arthur Ashkin +2 more

William D. Phillips

Summary form only given. Laser light can exert a force on atoms so as to slow and cool them; sufficiently cold atoms can be held in electromagnetic bottles. This talk, based on the Nobel Lecture given in Stockholm in December 1997, describes the experiments at NIST-Gaithersburg that demonstrated the deceleration of atomic beams, trapping atoms in magnetic traps, and the achievement of temperatures much lower than had been thought possible eventually reaching below one microkelvin.

Steven Chu, John E. Bjorkholm, Arthur Ashkin +1 more

Carl Wieman

The following article is a written version of the Richtmyer award lecture given to the annual meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers in January 1996. I discuss the basic idea of Bose–Einstein condensation in a gas and how it has been produced and examined. To cool the atoms to the point of condensation we use laser cooling and trapping, followed by magnetic trapping and evaporative cooling. These techniques are explained, along with the signatures of Bose–Einstein condensation that we observe. I also discuss how very similar laser cooling and trapping techniques have been incorporated into undergraduate laboratory experiments.