Single-Photon Atomic Cooling - Raizen Lab - The University of ...

to other existing cooling techniques. The prospects of such a demonstration
are particularly promising in light of recent work with supersonic beams which
produced trapped samples of paramagnetic atoms [97, 98] and molecules [99–
102] at tens of millikelvins in a simple room-temperature apparatus. The
general nature of the single-photon cooling technique means that it can po-
tentially be adapted to cool and trap a large portion of these species, many of
which cannot be laser cooled with existing techniques. There has even been
a proposal to use this technique to cool molecules [103], which existing laser
cooling techniques have failed to cool due to their complicated energy level
structures.
The main focus in our lab however will be the application of single-
photon atomic cooling to hydrogenic isotopes. The methods described in this
dissertation, with appropriate modifications, are well suited to cooling and
trapping all three isotopes. In short, the proposed technique begins by seed-
ing a supersonic beam of neon with the hydrogenic isotope under study. After
entrainment, the hydrogenic beam will be brought to rest and trapped mag-
netically using an “atomic coilgun.” In fact, atomic hydrogen has already been
trapped in this manner [98]. Once trapped, the single-photon cooling process
will proceed in a manner similar to that discussed in this dissertation. The
species will initially be in the |F = 1,mF = 1〉 state. These atoms will be
depopulated near their classical turning points by driving them into the 2s
manifold via a two-photon transition at 243 nm. This long lived metastable
state will be quenched by application of a DC electric field mixing it with
180