Sisyphus cooling in a continuously loaded trap

2013

Article

OS Lab

We demonstrate continuous Sisyphus cooling combined with a continuous loading mechanism used to efficiently slow down and accumulate chromium atoms from a guided beam. While the loading itself is based on a single slowing step, applying a radio frequency field forces the atoms to repeat this step many times resulting in a so-called Sisyphus cooling. This extension allows efficient loading and cooling of atoms from a wide range of initial beam conditions. We study the interplay of the continuous loading and simultaneous Sisyphus cooling in different density regimes. In the case of a low density flux we observe a differential gain in phase-space density of nine orders of magnitude. This makes the presented scheme an ideal tool for reaching collisional densities enabling evaporative cooling—in spite of unfavourable initial conditions.

@article{sisyph13,
  title = {Sisyphus cooling in a continuously loaded trap},
  author = {Volchkov, Valentin and R{\"u}hrig, Jahn and Pfau, Tilman and Griesmaier, Axel},
  journal = { New Journal of Physics},
  volume = {15},
  pages = {093012},
  publisher = { IOP Publishing and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft},
  month = sep,
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.1088/1367-2630/15/9/093012},
  month_numeric = {9}
}