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arXiv · 1511.00168

Photoassociative cooling and trapping of a pair of interacting atoms

Subrata Saha·Somnath Naskar·Bimalendu Deb
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Abstract

We show that it is possible to cool interacting pairs of atoms by a lin $\perp$ lin Sisyphus-like laser cooling scheme using counter-propagating photoassociation (PA) lasers. It is shown that the center-of-mass motion (c.m.) of atom pairs can be trapped in molecular spin-dependent periodic potentials generated by the lasers. The proposed scheme is most effective for narrow-line PA transitions. We illustrate this with numerical calculations using fermionic $^{171}$Yb atoms as an example.

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Subrata Saha, Somnath Naskar, Bimalendu Deb. 2016-09-09. Photoassociative cooling and trapping of a pair of interacting atoms. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.94.023413

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