Laser cooling of a magnetically guided ultracold atom beam

2010

Article

OS Lab

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.

@article{guidecool10,
  title = {Laser cooling of a magnetically guided ultracold atom beam},
  author = {Aghajani-Talesh, Anoush and Falkenau, Markus and Volchkov, Valentin and Trafford, Leah and Griesmaier, Axel and Pfau, Tilman},
  journal = {New Journal of Physics},
  volume = {12},
  pages = {065018},
  publisher = { IOP Publishing and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft},
  month = jun,
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.1088/1367-2630/12/6/065018},
  month_numeric = {6}
}