Over the past 25 years, laser cooling and trapping have transformed experimental atomic physics. Kevin Weatherill and Edgar Vredenbregt describe how ultracold particle beams could soon do the same for nanoscience applications.
The past few years have seen remarkable developments in the ability to control atomic motion by optical techniques. Among the key tools that have been developed for this purpose are the techniques of laser cooling, the significance of which was recognized by the award of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics to Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William Phillips. These techniques have made it possible to cool atoms to temperatures lower than have been produced in any other physical system - around 10(-8) degrees Kelvin above absolute zero - and to confine those in traps for extended periods of observation.
Abstract Many areas of physics—precision measurements, quantum information, and physical chemistry, to name a few—are starting to benefit from the enormous advantages offered by cold and ultracold polar molecules. Molecules have more states, more interactions, and more chemical properties compared to atoms, which make them exciting to study but difficult to tame. In particular, the powerful techniques of atomic laser cooling cannot be naïvely applied to molecules due to their complicated structure. Developments over the past few years have made directly laser cooled and trapped molecules a reality, and now much effort is focused on making these samples larger, denser, and colder—an important step to realizing many of their exciting applications. A careful experimental and numerical study by Truppe et al (2017 New J. Phys. 19 022001 ) demonstrates a significant improvement and advance in understanding of one of the most limiting steps in laser cooling and trapping of molecules—slowing them from a molecular beam to a near-standstill, with small enough kinetic energy that they can be loaded into a trap.
Radiation pressure from lasers has been used to cool and compress 9Be+ ions stored in a combination of static electric and magnetic fields (Penning trap) to tem eratures less than 10 mK and densities greater than lo7 cm-q in a magnetic field of 1.4 T. A technique called sympathetic cooling can be used to transfer this cooling and compression to other ion species. ions sympathetically cooled by laser cooled 9Be+ ions is given. source vi? sympathetic cooling is also discussed. A n example of lg8Hg+ The possibility of making an ultracold positron Ion traps have been used in low energy atomic physics experiments for a period of roughly 30 years.1*2) years, however, the technique of laser cooling and compression has greatly increased the potential use of stored ions in a number of applications. One example is time and frequency standards. With the technique of laser cooling and compression, ion temperatures less than 10 mK, densities a factor of 10 less than the Brillouin limit (defined below), and essentially indefinite confinement times have been obtained. 3,4) Unfortunately, elementary charged particles (electrons, positrons, protons, etc.) can not be directly laser During the past 10