Laser cooling of dense atomic gases by collisional redistribution of radiation and spectroscopy of molecular dimers in a dense buffer gas environment

Abstract

We study laser cooling of atomic gases by collisional redistribution of fluorescence. In a high pressure buffer gas regime, frequent collisions perturb the energy levels of alkali atoms, which allows for the absorption of a far red detuned irradiated laser beam. Subsequent spontaneous decay occurs close to the unperturbed resonance frequency, leading to a cooling of the dense gas mixture by redistribution of fluorescence. Thermal deflection spectroscopy indicates large relative temperature changes down to and even below room temperature starting from an initial cell temperature near 700 K. We are currently performing a detailed analysis of the temperature distribution in the cell. As we expect this cooling technique to work also for molecular-noble gas mixtures, we also present initial spectroscopic experiments on alkali-dimers in a dense buffer gas surrounding.

8 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (6)

• 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
• Collisional Redistribution Laser Cooling of a High Pressure Atomic Gas
• Laser cooling of a potassium-argon gas mixture using collisional redistribution of radiation
• Laser Cooling of Dense Rubidium-Noble Gas Mixtures via Collisional Redistribution of Radiation
• Towards redistribution laser cooling of molecular gases: Production of candidate molecules SrH by laser ablation