We describe measurements demonstrating laser cooling of an atomic gas by means of collisional redistribution of radiation. The experiment uses rubidium atoms in the presence of several hundred bar of argon buffer gas pressure. Frequent collisions in the dense gas transiently shift a far red detuned optical field into resonance, while spontaneous emission occurs close to the unperturbed atomic transition frequency. Evidence for the cooling is obtained both via thermographic imaging and via thermographic deflection spectroscopy. The cooled gas has a density above 10$^{21}$ atoms/cm$^3$, yielding evidence for the laser cooling of a macroscopic ensemble of gas atoms.
We propose a laser cooling technique in which atoms are selectively excited to a dressed metastable state whose light shift and decay rate are spatially correlated for Sisyphus cooling. The case of cooling magnetically trapped (anti)hydrogen with the 1S-2S-3P transitions using pulsed ultra violet and continuous-wave visible lasers is numerically simulated. We find a number of appealing features including rapid 3-dimensional cooling from ~1 K to recoil-limited, millikelvin temperatures, as well as suppressed spin-flip loss and manageable photoionization loss.
We have recorded fluorescence spectra of the atomic rubidium D-lines in the presence of several hundreds of bars buffer gas pressure. With additional saturation broadening a spectral linewidth comparable to the thermal energy of the atoms in the heated gas cell is achieved. An intensity-dependent blue asymmetry of the spectra is observed, which becomes increasingly pronounced when extrapolating to infinitely high light intensity. We interpret our results as evidence for the dressed (coupled atom-light) states to approach thermal equilibrium.
We observe spin transfer within a non-degenerate heteronuclear spinor atomic gas comprised of a small $^7$Li population admixed with a $^{87}$Rb bath, with both elements in their $F=1$ hyperfine spin manifolds and at temperatures of 10s of $mu$K. Prepared in a non-equilibrium initial state, the $^7$Li spin distribution evolves through incoherent spin-changing collisions toward a steady-state distribution. We identify and measure the cross-sections of all three types of spin-dependent heteronuclear collisions, namely the spin-exchange, spin-mixing, and quadrupole-exchange interactions, and find agreement with predictions of heteronuclear $^7$Li-$^{87}$Rb interactions at low energy. Moreover, we observe that the steady state of the $^7$Li spinor gas can be controlled by varying the composition of the $^{87}$Rb spin bath with which it interacts.
Radio-frequency electric-dipole transitions between nearly degenerate, opposite parity levels of atomic dysprosium (Dy) were monitored over an eight-month period to search for a variation in the fine-structure constant, $alpha$. The data provide a rate of fractional temporal variation of $alpha$ of $(-2.4pm2.3)times10^{-15}$ yr$^{-1}$ or a value of $(-7.8 pm 5.9) times 10^{-6}$ for $k_alpha$, the variation coefficient for $alpha$ in a changing gravitational potential. All results indicate the absence of significant variation at the present level of sensitivity. We also present initial results on laser cooling of an atomic beam of dysprosium.
We analyze the temporal response of the fluorescence light that is emitted from a dense gas of cold atoms driven by a laser. When the average interatomic distance is smaller than the wavelength of the photons scattered by the atoms, the system exhibits strong dipolar interactions and collective dissipation. We solve the exact dynamics of small systems with different geometries and show how these collective features are manifest in the scattered light properties such as the photon emission rate, the power spectrum and the second-order correlation function. By calculating these quantities beyond the weak driving limit, we make progress in understanding the signatures of collective behavior in these many-body systems. Furthermore, we clarify the role of disorder on the resonance fluorescence, of direct relevance for recent experimental efforts that aim at the exploration of many-body effects in dipole-dipole interacting gases of atoms.