Laser Cooling at Resonance

Abstract

We show experimentally that 3-D laser cooling of lithium atoms is achieved when the laser light is tuned exactly to resonance with the atomic transition. For a theoretical description of this surprising phenomenon we resolve to a full model which takes into account both the entire atomic structure and the laser light polarization. Here we build such a model for ${}^7$Li atoms cooled on the $D_2$-line in a ${\sigma }^{+}-{\sigma }^{-}$ laser configuration. We take all 24 Zeeman sub-levels into account and obtain good agreement with the experimental data. Moreover, by means of Monte-Carlo simulations we show that coherent processes play an important role in showing consistency between the theory and the experimental results.

arXiv comment10 pages, 9 figures

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Magneto-optical trapping of mercury at high phase space density