We report the cooling of an atomic ensemble with light, where each atom scatters only a single photon on average. This is a general method that does not require a cycling transition and can be applied to atoms or molecules which are magnetically trapped. We discuss the application of this new approach to the cooling of hydrogenic atoms for the purpose of precision spectroscopy and fundamental tests.
Single-Photon Cooling (SPC), noted for its potential as a versatile method for cooling a variety of atomic species, has recently been demonstrated experimentally. In this paper, we study possible ways to improve the performance of SPC by applying it to atoms trapped inside a wedge billiard. The main feature of wedge billiard for atoms, also experimentally realized recently, is that the nature of atomic trajectories within it changes from stable periodic orbit to random chaotic motion with the change in wedge angle. We find that a high cooling efficiency is possible in this system with a relatively weak dependence on the wedge angle, and that chaotic dynamics, rather than regular orbit, is more desirable for enhancing the performance of SPC.
We propose a general method to cool the translational motion of molecules. Our method is an extension of single photon atomic cooling which was successfully implemented in our laboratory. Requiring a single event of absorption followed by a spontaneous emission, this method circumvents the need for a cycling transition and can be applied to any paramagnetic or polar molecule. In our approach, trapped molecules would be captured near their classical turning points in an optical dipole or RF-trap following an irreversible transition process.
Isotope separation is one of the grand challenges of modern society and holds great potential for basic science, medicine, energy, and defense. We consider here a new and general approach to isotope separation. The method is based on an irreversible change of the mass-to-magnetic moment ratio of a particular isotope in an atomic beam, followed by a magnetic multipole whose gradients deflect and guide the atoms. The underlying mechanism is a reduction of the entropy of the beam by the information of a single-scattered photon for each atom that is separated. We numerically simulate isotope separation for a range of examples, including lithium, for which we describe the experimental setup we are currently constructing. Simulations of other examples demonstrate this techniques general applicability to almost the entire periodic table. We show that the efficiency of the process is only limited by the available laser power, since one photon on average enables the separation of one atom. The practical importance of the proposed method is that large-scale isotope separation should be possible, using ordinary inexpensive magnets and the existing technologies of supersonic beams and lasers.
Ultracold molecular gases are promising as an avenue to rich many-body physics, quantum chemistry, quantum information, and precision measurements. This richness, which flows from the complex internal structure of molecules, makes the creation of ultracold molecular gases using traditional methods (laser plus evaporative cooling) a challenge, in particular due to the spontaneous decay of molecules into dark states. We propose a way to circumvent this key bottleneck using an all-optical method for decelerating molecules using stimulated absorption and emission with a single ultrafast laser. We further describe single-photon cooling of the decelerating molecules that exploits their high dark state pumping rates, turning the principal obstacle to molecular laser cooling into an advantage. Cooling and deceleration may be applied simultaneously and continuously to load molecules into a trap. We discuss implementation details including multi-level numerical simulations of strontium monohydride (SrH). These techniques are applicable to a large number of molecular species and atoms with the only requirement being an electric dipole transition that can be accessed with an ultrafast laser.
We demonstrate a general and efficient informational cooling technique for atoms which is an experimental realization of a one-dimensional Maxwells Demon. The technique transfers atoms from a magnetic trap into an optical trap via a single spontaneous Raman transition which is discriminatively driven near each atoms classical turning point. In this way, nearly all of the atomic ensembles kinetic energy in one dimension is removed. We develop a simple analytical model to predict the efficiency of transfer between the traps and provide evidence that the performance is limited only by particle dynamics in the magnetic trap. Transfer efficiencies up to 2.2% are reported. We show that efficiency can be traded for phase-space compression, and we report compression up to a factor of 350. Our results represent a 15-fold improvement over our previous demonstration of the cooling technique.