Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 5516–5519 (1998)Optical Collisions of Cold, Metastable Helium AtomsReceived 5 December 1997; published in the issue dated 22 June 1998 We have studied the optical collisions of cold, metastable helium atoms in a magneto-optical trap. We have detected the rate of Penning and associative ionization of two metastable helium atoms at a temperature of 1 mK with and without nearly resonant light. We find that the associative ionization rate is increased with more than a factor 20 due to the presence of the light field. We present a simple, semiclassical model, which accounts for all the observed features, and which agrees, also on an absolute scale, with our experimental results. © 1998 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.5516
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.5516
PACS:
32.80.Pj, 33.80.Eh, 34.50.Rk
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