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APS » Journals » Phys. Rev. Lett. » Volume 61 » Issue 7
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 826–829 (1988)

Laser Cooling below the One-Photon Recoil Energy by Velocity-Selective Coherent Population Trapping

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A. Aspect, E. Arimondo*, R. Kaiser, N. Vansteenkiste, and C. Cohen-Tannoudji
Laboratoire de Spectroscopie Hertzienne de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure et Collège de France, F-75231 Paris Cedex 05, France

Received 11 July 1988; published in the issue dated 15 August 1988

We present a new laser-cooling scheme based on velocity-selective optical pumping of atoms into a nonabsorbing coherent superposition of states. This method has allowed us to achieve transverse cooling of metastable 4He atoms to a temperature of 2 μK, lower than both the usual Doppler cooling limit (23 μK) and the one-photon recoil energy (4 μK). The corresponding de Broglie wavelength (1.4 μm) is larger than the atomic-transition optical wavelength.

© 1988 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.61.826
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.61.826
PACS:
32.80.Pj, 42.50.Vk

*Permanent address: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Pisa, I-56100 Pisa, Italy.

 
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