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Annual Meeting Optical Society of America

Subrecoil laser cooling: recent developments in velocity-selective coherent population trapping

F. Bardou, Olivier Émile, Bruno Saubaméa, Kazuko Shimizu, Christoph Ira Westbrook, Alain Aspect, Claude N. Cohen-Tannoudji

Published Jan 1, 1993• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Velocity-selective coherent population trapping (VSCPT) is the first demonstrated sub-recoil laser cooling scheme.1
DOI
10.1364/oam.1993.tum.2

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Physical Review A•Jun 1, 1994•64 citations
This paper presents new experimental realizations of sub‐recoil laser cooling by velocity selective coherent population trapping (VSCPT). Starting from a cloud of trapped and precooled metastable helium atoms, it has been possible to achieve a VSCPT interaction time of 500 μs. This has enabled the momentum distribution to be compressed along one or two orthogonal axes to better than δp = ħk/4 where ħk is the photon momentum. The corresponding temperature is at least 16 times smaller than the single photon recoil limit, and the de Broglie wavelength of the atoms is at least 4 times larger than the wavelength of the laser used to cool the atoms. Recent theoretical developments are also described, establishing a connection between subrecoil cooling and Lévy flights and allowing one to get analytical expressions for the proportion of cooled atoms in the long time limit. Finally, the possibility of increasing the efficiency of VSCPT by Sisyphus precooling is briefly mentioned.
In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in velocity selective coherent population trapping (VSCPT).1 However, since VSCPT occurs via a random walk in momentum space, in order to achieve significant VSCPT in three dimensions, it is necessary to precool and confine atoms dose to the recoil momentum. Shahriar et al.2 recently predicted that this type of cooling and velocity confinement assisted VSCPT can be achieved in one, two, or three dimensions when a Λ-system atom is excited by a pair of blue detuned Raman resonant standing waves, with a phase difference of θ = π/4.
We present a fully quantum-mechanical analysis of laser cooling of an angular momentum Jg{\mathit{J}}_{\mathit{g}}Jg​=1 to Je{\mathit{J}}_{\mathit{e}}Je​=1 transition in a laser configuration consisting of two counterpropagating linearly polarized laser beams. The essential feature of this configuration is the coexistence of velocity-selective coherent population trapping (VSCPT) and polarization-gradient cooling. The role of polarization-gradient cooling is to provide (i) for short interaction times ``precooling'' of the initial momentum distribution and (ii) in the long-time limit ``confinement of velocities.'' This eventually leads to a larger number of atoms being captured in the dark state when compared with the schme of Aspect et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 826 (1988)]. We find that the optimum parameter values for polarization-gradient cooling and VSCPT are in a completely different parameter regime: polarization-gradient cooling works best off resonance and for low intensities, while VSCPT works best on resonance. We can combine the advantages of polarization-gradient cooling and VSCPT in a scheme where we cycle in time between the optimum cooling parameters for both cooling mechanisms.