Abstract

Recently, great progress has been made in the cooling and trapping of atoms. It is now possible to create a collection of atoms with a number density in excess of 10¹¹cm^-3 and a kinetic temperature of the order of 10 μK. At such low temperatures the mean atomic velocity is of the order of 10cm/sec and the resulting Doppler width of the atomic transition is much lower than the homogeneous width. Furthermore, it has been shown that a substantial fraction of the atoms are localized inside wavelength-scale potential wells due to light-shifts[1]. Such a collection of essentially stationary atoms provide a reasonably large nonlinear susceptibility that can be exploited for the study of various nonlinear optical interactions [2].

© 1992 Optical Society of America