2018/03/31 by Zhenlian Shi, Pengjun Wang, Ziliang Li +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0256-307x/35/12/123701
published as Published in Chin. Phys. Lett. Vol. 35, No. 12 (2018) 123701 · 5 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2018/12/10 · arxiv updated 2018/12/26
We report on the efficient gray molasses cooling of sodium atoms using the D2 optical transition at 589.1 nm. Thanks to the hyperfine split about 6Γ between the |F'=2⟩ and |F'=3⟩ in the excited state 32P3/2, this atomic transition is effective for the gray molasses cooling mechanism. Using this cooling technique, the atomic sample in F = 2 ground manifold is cooled from 700 \upmuK to 56 \upmuK in 3.5 ms. We observe that the loading efficiency into magnetic trap is increased due to the lower temperature and high phase space density of atomic cloud after gray molasses. This technique offers a promising route for the fast cooling of the sodium atoms in the F=2 state.