Abstract

We investigate three-dimensional cooling and trapping of neutral atoms in a two-beam optical molasses which is created by one laser plane wave of linear polarization and a counterpropagating speckle laser field of orthogonal linear polarization. Such a speckle field can be created, for instance, by introducing a diffusor into a laser plane wave, which gives rise to a highly irregular, but still stationary, spatial distribution of light intensity and phase.

© 1998 IEEE