4 March 2004
Cool for atoms
The 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. Laser cooling has since become indispensable in many fields of research. Like other conventional cooling mechanisms, this involves a dissipative process, usually spontaneous emission of light by the atom. Maunz et al. now demonstrate a new way of cooling atoms that avoids this ubiquitous process. Instead, the target atom is coupled to a high-finesse optical resonator. Photons escape from the cavity with more energy than when they entered it, at the expense of a reduction in the atom's kinetic energy. This 'cavity cooling' scheme is potentially very powerful and might be used on systems that cannot be cooled by conventional methods — an atom carrying a quantum bit, for instance.
Cavity cooling of a single atom
P. MAUNZ, T. PUPPE, I. SCHUSTER, N. SYASSEN, P. W.
H. PINKSE & G. REMPE
Nature 428, 50–52 (2004); doi:10.1038/nature02387
| First
Paragraph | Full
Text (HTML / PDF) |