No Arabic abstract
We present a narrow linewidth continuous laser source with over 11 Watts of output power at 780nm, based on single-pass frequency doubling of an amplified 1560nm fibre laser with 36% efficiency. This source offers a combination of high power, simplicity, mode quality and stability. Without any active stabilization, the linewidth is measured to be below 10kHz. The fibre seed is tunable over 60GHz, which allows access to the D2 transitions in 87Rb and 85Rb, providing a viable high-power source for laser cooling as well as for large-momentum-transfer beamsplitters in atom interferometry. Sources of this type will pave the way for a new generation of high flux, high duty-cycle degenerate quantum gas experiments.
We demonstrate a compact laser source suitable for the trapping and cooling of potassium. By frequency doubling a fiber laser diode at 1534 nm in a waveguide, we produce 767 nm laser light. A current modulation of the diode allows to generate the two required frequencies for cooling in a simple and robust apparatus. We successfully used this laser source to trap ^39 K.
We investigate sub-Doppler laser cooling of bosonic potassium isotopes, whose small hyperfine splitting has so far prevented cooling below the Doppler temperature. We find instead that the combination of a dark optical molasses scheme that naturally arises in this kind of systems and an adiabatic ramping of the laser parameters allows to reach sub-Doppler temperatures for small laser detunings. We demonstrate temperatures as low as 25(3)microK and 47(5)microK in high-density samples of the two isotopes 39K and 41K, respectively. Our findings will find application to other atomic systems.
Recent work with laser-cooled molecules in attractive optical traps has shown that the differential AC Stark shifts arising from the trap light itself can become problematic, limiting collisional shielding efficiencies, rotational coherence times, and laser-cooling temperatures. In this work, we explore trapping and laser-cooling of CaF molecules in a ring-shaped repulsive optical trap. The observed dependences of loss rates on temperature and barrier height show characteristic behavior of repulsive traps and indicate strongly suppressed average AC Stark shifts. Within the trap, we find that $Lambda$-enhanced gray molasses cooling is effective, producing similar minimum temperatures as those obtained in free space. By combining in-trap laser cooling with dynamical reshaping of the trap, we also present a method that allows highly efficient and rapid transfer from molecular magneto-optical traps into conventional attractive optical traps, which has been an outstanding challenge for experiments to date. Notably, our method could allow nearly lossless transfer over millisecond timescales.
We present a method for producing three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates using only laser cooling. The phase transition to condensation is crossed with $2.5 {times} 10^{4}$ $^{87}mathrm{Rb}$ atoms at a temperature of $T_{mathrm{c}} = 0.6 mumathrm{K}$ after 1.4 s of cooling. Atoms are trapped in a crossed optical dipole trap and cooled using Raman cooling with far-off-resonant optical pumping light to reduce atom loss and heating. The achieved temperatures are well below the effective recoil temperature. We find that during the final cooling stage at atomic densities above $10^{14} mathrm{cm}^{-3}$, careful tuning of trap depth and optical-pumping rate is necessary to evade heating and loss mechanisms. The method may enable the fast production of quantum degenerate gases in a variety of systems including fermions.
We demonstrate three-dimensional (3-D) quenched narrow-line laser cooling and trapping of 40Ca. With 5 ms of cooling time we can transfer 28 % of the atoms from a magneto-optic trap based on the strong 423 nm cooling line to a trap based on the narrow 657 nm clock transition (that is quenched by an intercombination line at 552 nm), thereby reducing the atoms temperature from 2 millikelvin to 10 microkelvin. This reduction in temperature should help reduce the overall systematic frequency uncertainty for our Ca optical frequency standard to < 1 Hz. Additional pulsed, quenched narrow-line third-stage cooling in 1-D yields sub-recoil temperatures as low as 300 nK, and makes possible the observation of high-contrast two-pulse Ramsey spectroscopic lineshapes.