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arXiv · physics/9805037

Atom cooling and trapping by disorder

Peter Horak·Jean-Yves Courtois·Gilbert Grynberg
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Abstract

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.

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Peter Horak, Jean-Yves Courtois, Gilbert Grynberg. 1998-05-29. Atom cooling and trapping by disorder. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.58.3953

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