Abstract
We present a new laser-cooling scheme based on velocity-selective optical pumping of atoms into a nonabsorbing coherent superposition of states. This method has allowed us to achieve transverse cooling of metastable atoms to a temperature of 2 μK, lower than both the usual Doppler cooling limit (23 μK) and the one-photon recoil energy (4 μK). The corresponding de Broglie wavelength (1.4 μm) is larger than the atomic-transition optical wavelength.
- Received 11 July 1988
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.61.826
©1988 American Physical Society
Collections
This article appears in the following collections:
The Physical Review Journals Celebrate The International Year of Light
The editors of the Physical Review journals revisit papers that represent important breakthroughs in the field of optics.
Letters from the Past - A PRL Retrospective
2008 marked PRL’s 50th anniversary. As part of the celebrations a collection of milestone Letters was started. The collection contains Letters that have made long-lived contributions to physics, either by announcing significant discoveries, or by initiating new areas of research.