Trapping cold ground state argon atoms for sympathetic cooling of molecules

Abstract

We trap cold, ground-state, argon atoms in a deep optical dipole trap produced by a build-up cavity. The atoms, which are a general source for the sympathetic cooling of molecules, are loaded in the trap by quenching them from a cloud of laser-cooled metastable argon atoms. Although the ground state atoms cannot be directly probed, we detect them by observing the collisional loss of co-trapped metastable argon atoms using a new type of parametric loss spectroscopy. Using this technique we also determine the polarizability ratio between the ground and the metastable 4s[3/2]${}_2$ state to be 40$\pm 6$ and find a polarisability of (7.3$\pm$1.1) $\times$10${}^{-39}$ Cm${}^2/$V for the metastable state. Finally, Penning and associative losses of metastable atoms, in the absence of light assisted collisions, are determined to be $(3.3\pm 0.8)\times 10^{-10}$ cm${}^3$s${}^{-1}$.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Low-temperature chemistry using the R-matrix method
• Measurement of Rb 5P3/2 scalar and tensor polarizabilities in a 1064 nm light field
• Low temperature scattering with the R-matrix method: argon-argon scattering
• Dynamics of a buffer-gas-loaded, deep optical trap for molecules
• Characterising a tunable, pulsed atomic beam using matter-wave interferometry