Abstract

Less than twenty species of neutral atoms have been manipulated through laser cooling techniques with conventional single-frequency lasers and their highly efficient frequency conversion techniques. However, Most elements used for the laser cooling have been alkali metals, alkalineearth metals or rare gases, and there has been no report on laser cooling of atoms useful in engineering, such as semiconductor atoms. As for laser cooling of silicon, (1) the laser wavelength is required to be tunable around 252 nm, whose corresponding transition is between 3p ³P¹, and 4s ³P₀ of neutral silicon, (2) the linewidth should be narrower than the natural linewidth of the transition of 28.8 MHz and (3) the output power should be more than several tens of mW. As the above requirements are too difficult to satisfy, no practical light source for silicon has been developed yet.

© 2001 Optical Society of America