Abstract
Laser cooling on transitions with a linewidth Γ much narrower than the recoil shift ℏk2/m is studied numerically according to a full quantum-mechanical treatment of the photon recoil. We propose and investigate a broadband spectral configuration that has the purposes of (1) shortening the long cooling time characteristic for monochromatic laser cooling on a slow transition and (2) reducing the kinetic energy of the stationary momentum distributions considerably below the one-photon recoil energy (ℏk)2/2m. The energies of the computed stationary distributions are limited only by the energy uncertainty of the narrow transition ℏΓ ≪ (ℏk)2/2m. Applications to laser cooling of alkaline earths on the narrow intercombination lines are discussed.
© 1989 Optical Society of America
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
Y. Castin, H. Wallis, and J. Dalibard
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 6(11) 2046-2057 (1989)
V. G. Minogin, M. A. Olshany, and S. U. Shulga
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 6(11) 2108-2111 (1989)
A. Aspect, E. Arimondo, R. Kaiser, N. Vansteenkiste, and C. Cohen-Tannoudji
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 6(11) 2112-2124 (1989)