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Annual Meeting Optical Society of America

Slowing and Cooling an Atomic Beam Using an Optical Standing Wave

M. G. Prentiss, A. Cable

Published Jan 1, 1988• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have demonstrated that a continuous supply of slow atoms can be produced using a strong standing wave laser field collinear with an atomic beam.
DOI
10.1364/oam.1988.pdp7

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We have demonstrated a new slowing and cooling technique which uses a standing-wave laser field collinear with a thermal Na atomic beam to produce a continuous supply of slow atoms, with most probable velocities ranging from -40 to + 80 m/sec. The velocity spread can be \ensuremath{\sim}10 m/sec (150 mK), the density >108{>10}^{8}>108, and the peak density in phase space \ensuremath{\sim}100 times that at the peak of the original Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.
We have demonstrated that a continuous supply of stow atoms can be produced using a strong standing wave laser field collinear with an atomic beam. Using an interaction length of 27 cm, we typically obtained an atomic beam with a density of ~1 × 10−8cm−3, a most probable velocity of 12 m/s, and a width in velocity space of <12 m/s. We used such a cooled atomic beam to load a magnetic molasses trap.1 We found that the motion of atoms in the trap is not always diffusive but can be confined to very narrow channels, which can be curved and can extend over lengths of several millimeters. In addition, the fluorescence due to the trapped atoms was examined using an optical microscope, and we observed that there were strong spatial variations in the fluorescence. The variations had two distinct components: very regular striations due to interference between the trapping light fields and very irregular variations with a characteristic size scale, which was not strongly correlated with that of the interference fringes.
We investigate the force on a two-level atom interacting with intense monochromatic laser fields which are combinations of standing and traveling waves. We present a continued-fraction solution to the optical Bloch equations. Using this solution to calculate the force on an atom, we have examined the slowing and cooling of a thermal Na atomic beam. We find that the addition of a traveling wave to an intense standing wave can significantly improve the slowing rate and simultaneously decrease the final velocity of the cooled beam.