Abstract

One of the goals of laser cooling is to reach the lowest possible temperatures and correspondingly to achieve the largest possible coherence length. In usual laser cooling schemes, fluorescence cycles never cease, so that there are always random recoils due to the spontaneously emitted photons. It is then impossible to reach a temperature below the single photon recoil temperature T_R, defined by and corresponding to the recoil kinetic energy of an atom with mass M absorbing or emitting a single photon with momentum ħk.

© 1994 IEEE