Laser Cooling of Cesium Atoms Below 3 μK
Ch Salomon, Jean Dalibard, William D. Phillips +2 more
We have measured the temperature of cesium atoms released from optical molasses. For a wide range of laser intensity and detuning from resonance, the temperature depends only on the intensity-to-detuning ratio. The lowest temperature achieved is (2.5 ± 0.6) μK, which corresponds to an r.m.s. velocity of 12.5 mm/s or 3.6 times the single-photon recoil velocity. This is, to our knowledge, the coldest kinetic temperature ever measured for three-dimensional (3D) cooling.
Europhysics Letters (EPL)•Aug 15, 1990•239 citations