Laser cooling of a potassium-argon gas mixture using collisional redistribution of radiation

Abstract

We study laser cooling of atomic gases by collisional redistribution, a technique applicable to ultradense atomic ensembles at a pressure of a few hundred bar. Frequent collisions of an optically active atom with a buffer gas shift atoms into resonance with a far red detuned laser beam, while spontaneous decay occurs close to the unperturbed resonance frequency. In such an excitation cycle, a kinetic energy of the order of the thermal energy kT is extracted from the sample. Here we report of recent experiments investigating the cooling of a potassium-argon gas mixture, which compared to an rubidium-argon mixture investigated in earlier experiments has a smaller fine structure of the optically active alkali atom. We observe a relative cooling of the potassium-argon gas mixture by 120 K.

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References in corpus (2)

• Laser Cooling by Collisional Redistribution of Radiation
• Spectroscopy of atomic rubidium at 500 bar buffer gas pressure: approaching the thermal equilibrium of dressed atom-light states

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Laser Cooling of Dense Rubidium-Noble Gas Mixtures via Collisional Redistribution of Radiation
• Laser refrigeration using exciplex resonances in gas filled hollow-core fibres
• Laser cooling of dense atomic gases by collisional redistribution of radiation and spectroscopy of molecular dimers in a dense buffer gas environment