Atom cooling and trapping by disorder

1998/05/29 by Peter Horak, Péter Horák, Jean-Yves Courtois +2 · 7 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #physics.atom-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.58.3953

published as Phys. Rev. A 58, 3953 (1998) · 11 figures (postscript)

arxiv created 1998/05/29 · openalex publication_date 1998/11/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We demonstrate the possibility of three-dimensional cooling of neutral atoms by illuminating them with two counterpropagating laser beams of mutually orthogonal linear polarization, where one of the lasers is a speckle field, i.e., a highly disordered but stationary coherent light field. This configuration gives rise to atom cooling in the transverse plane via a Sisyphus cooling mechanism similar to the one known in standard two-dimensional optical lattices formed by several plane laser waves. However, striking differences occur in the spatial diffusion coefficients as well as in local properties of the trapped atoms.

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