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Atom cooling and trapping by disorder

1998; American Physical Society; Volume: 58; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1103/physreva.58.3953

1538-4446

Péter Horák, Jean-Yves Courtois, G. Grynberg,

Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications

We demonstrate the possibility of three-dimensional cooling of neutral atoms by illuminating them with two counterpropagating laser beams of mutually orthogonal linear polarization, where one of the lasers is a speckle field, i.e., a highly disordered but stationary coherent light field. This configuration gives rise to atom cooling in the transverse plane via a Sisyphus cooling mechanism similar to the one known in standard two-dimensional optical lattices formed by several plane laser waves. However, striking differences occur in the spatial diffusion coefficients as well as in local properties of the trapped atoms.