Optics and Sensing Laboratory Article 2010

Laser cooling of a magnetically guided ultracold atom beam

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Optics and Sensing Laboratory
Optics & Sensing Laboratory

We report on the transverse laser cooling of a magnetically guided beam of ultracold chromium atoms. Radial compression by a tapering of the guide is employed to adiabatically heat the beam. Inside the tapered section, heat is extracted from the atom beam by a two-dimensional (2D) optical molasses perpendicular to it, resulting in a significant increase in atomic phase space density. A magnetic offset field is applied to prevent optical pumping to untrapped states. Our results demonstrate that, by a suitable choice of the magnetic offset field, the cooling beam intensity and detuning, atom losses and longitudinal heating can be avoided. Final temperatures below 65 μK have been achieved, corresponding to an increase in phase space density in the guided beam by more than a factor of 30.

Author(s): Anoush Aghajani-Talesh and Markus Falkenau and Valentin Volchkov and Leah Trafford and Axel Griesmaier and Tilman Pfau
Journal: New Journal of Physics
Volume: 12
Pages: 065018
Year: 2010
Month: June
Day: 28
Publisher: IOP Publishing and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft
Bibtex Type: Article (article)
DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/12/6/065018
State: Published
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive

BibTex

@article{guidecool10,
  title = {Laser cooling of a magnetically guided ultracold atom beam},
  journal = {New Journal of Physics},
  abstract = {We report on the transverse laser cooling of a magnetically guided beam of ultracold chromium atoms. Radial compression by a tapering of the guide is employed to adiabatically heat the beam. Inside the tapered section, heat is extracted from the atom beam by a two-dimensional (2D) optical molasses perpendicular to it, resulting in a significant increase in atomic phase space density. A magnetic offset field is applied to prevent optical pumping to untrapped states. Our results demonstrate that, by a suitable choice of the magnetic offset field, the cooling beam intensity and detuning, atom losses and longitudinal heating can be avoided. Final temperatures below 65 μK have been achieved, corresponding to an increase in phase space density in the guided beam by more than a factor of 30.},
  volume = {12},
  pages = {065018},
  publisher = { IOP Publishing and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft},
  month = jun,
  year = {2010},
  slug = {guidecool10},
  author = {Aghajani-Talesh, Anoush and Falkenau, Markus and Volchkov, Valentin and Trafford, Leah and Griesmaier, Axel and Pfau, Tilman},
  month_numeric = {6}
}