Abstract

We report an experimental and theoretical study of the atomic motion in a misaligned retroreflected standing wave field. We measured the momentum transferred to an atomic beam by the misaligned laser beams. The geometry of the experiment is shown in Fig. 1. Suppose the moving angle of the atom is 2η and the misaligned angle between the two laser beams is 2θ; then the Doppler frequency shifts for the two beams are KV sin(η − θ) and —KV sin(η + θ), where K is the module of the propagating vectors K₁ and K₂, and V is the velocity of the atom.

© 1990 Optical Society of America