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Sub-Doppler Cooling
Sub-Doppler cooling is a class of laser cooling techniques that reduce the temperature of atoms and molecules below the Doppler cooling limit. Doppler cooling processes have a cooling limit that is characterized by the momentum recoil from the emission of a photon from the particle. Some methods of sub-Doppler cooling include optical molasses, Sisyphus cooling, evaporative cooling, free space Raman cooling, Raman side-band cooling, resolved sideband cooling, polarization gradient cooling, and the use of a dark magneto-optical trap. For example, an optical molasses time-of-flight technique was used to cool sodium (Doppler limit T_D \approx 240 \ \mu K) to 43 \pm 20 \ \mu K. Some possible motivations for sub-doppler cooling include cooling to the motional ground state, a requirement for maintaining fidelity during many quantum computation operations. Dark magneto-optical trap A magneto-optical trap A magneto-optical trap (MOT) is an apparatus which uses laser cooling and a s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Doppler Cooling Limit
Doppler cooling is a mechanism that can be used to trap and slow the motion of atoms to cool a substance. The term is sometimes used synonymously with laser cooling, though laser cooling includes other techniques. History Doppler cooling was simultaneously proposed by two groups in 1975, the first being David J. Wineland and Hans Georg Dehmelt and the second being Theodor W. Hänsch and Arthur Leonard Schawlow. It was first demonstrated by Wineland, Drullinger, and Walls in 1978 and shortly afterwards by Neuhauser, Hohenstatt, Toschek and Dehmelt. One conceptually simple form of Doppler cooling is referred to as optical molasses, since the dissipative optical force resembles the viscous drag on a body moving through molasses. Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips were awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in laser cooling and atom trapping. Brief explanation Doppler cooling involves light with frequency tuned slightly below an elect ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Doppler Cooling
Doppler cooling is a mechanism that can be used to trap and slow the motion of atoms to cool a substance. The term is sometimes used synonymously with laser cooling, though laser cooling includes other techniques. History Doppler cooling was simultaneously proposed by two groups in 1975, the first being David J. Wineland and Hans Georg Dehmelt and the second being Theodor W. Hänsch and Arthur Leonard Schawlow. It was first demonstrated by Wineland, Drullinger, and Walls in 1978 and shortly afterwards by Neuhauser, Hohenstatt, Toschek and Dehmelt. One conceptually simple form of Doppler cooling is referred to as optical molasses, since the dissipative optical force resembles the viscous drag on a body moving through molasses. Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips were awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in laser cooling and atom trapping. Brief explanation Doppler cooling involves light with frequency tuned slightly below an electron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optical Molasses
Optical molasses is a laser cooling technique that can cool neutral atoms to temperatures lower than a magneto-optical trap (MOT). An optical molasses consists of 3 pairs of counter-propagating circularly polarized laser beams intersecting in the region where the atoms are present. The main difference between optical molasses and a MOT is the absence of magnetic field in the former. Therefore, unlike a MOT, an optical molasses provides only cooling and no trapping. While a typical Sodium MOT can cool atoms down to 300μK, optical molasses can cool the atoms down to 40μK, an order of magnitude colder. History When laser cooling was proposed in 1975, a theoretical limit on the lowest possible temperature was predicted. Known as the Doppler limit, T_d= \hbar \Gamma / , this was given by the lowest possible temperature attainable considering the cooling of two-level atoms by Doppler cooling and the heating of atoms due to momentum diffusion from the scattering of laser photons. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sisyphus Cooling
In ultra-low-temperature physics, Sisyphus cooling, the Sisyphus effect, or polarization gradient cooling involves the use of specially selected laser light, hitting atoms from various angles to both cool and trap them in a potential well, effectively rolling the atom down a hill of potential energy until it has lost its kinetic energy. It is a type of laser cooling of atoms used to reach temperatures below the Doppler cooling limit. This cooling method was first proposed by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji in 1989, motivated by earlier experiments which observed sodium atoms cooled below the Doppler limit in an optical molasses. Cohen-Tannoudji received part of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for his work. The technique is named after Sisyphus, a figure in the Greek mythology who was doomed, for all eternity, to roll a stone up a mountain only to have it roll down again whenever he got it near the summit. Method Sisyphus cooling can be achieved by shining two counter-propagating laser ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evaporative Cooling (atomic Physics)
Evaporative cooling is an atomic physics technique to achieve high phase space densities which optical cooling techniques alone typically can not reach. Atoms trapped in optical or magnetic traps can be evaporatively cooled via two primary mechanisms, usually specific to the type of trap in question: in magnetic traps, radiofrequency (RF) fields are used to selectively drive warm atoms from the trap by inducing transitions between trapping and non-trapping spin states; or, in optical traps, the depth of the trap itself is gradually decreased, allowing the most energetic atoms in the trap to escape over the edges of the optical barrier. In the case of a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution for the velocities of the atoms in the trap, as in the figure at right, these atoms which escape/are driven out of the trap lie in the highest velocity tail of the distribution, meaning that their kinetic energy (and therefore temperature) is much higher than the average for the trap. The net result is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Raman Cooling
In atomic physics, Raman cooling is a sub-recoil cooling technique that allows the cooling of atoms using optical methods below the limitations of Doppler cooling, Doppler cooling being limited by the recoil energy of a photon given to an atom. This scheme can be performed in simple optical molasses or in molasses where an optical lattice has been superimposed, which are called respectively free space Raman cooling and Raman sideband cooling. Both techniques make use of Raman scattering of laser light by the atoms. Two photon Raman process The transition between two hyperfine states of the atom can be triggered by two laser beams: the first beam excites the atom to a virtual excited state (for example because its frequency is lower than the real transition frequency), and the second beam de-excites the atom to the other hyperfine level. The frequency difference of the two beams is exactly equal to the transition frequency between the two hyperfine levels. Raman transitions are goo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Resolved Sideband Cooling
Resolved sideband cooling is a laser cooling technique allowing cooling of tightly bound atoms and ions beyond the Doppler cooling limit, potentially to their motional ground state. Aside from the curiosity of having a particle at zero point energy, such preparation of a particle in a definite state with high probability (initialization) is an essential part of state manipulation experiments in quantum optics and quantum computing. Historical notes As of the writing of this article, the scheme behind what we refer to as ''resolved sideband cooling'' today is attributed to D.J. Wineland and H. Dehmelt, in their article ‘‘Proposed 10^\delta\nu/\nu laser fluorescence spectroscopy on mono-ion oscillator III (sideband cooling).’’ The clarification is important as at the time of the latter article, the term also designated what we call today Doppler cooling, which was experimentally realized with atomic ion clouds in 1978 by W. Neuhauser and independently by D.J. Wineland. A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polarization Gradient Cooling
Polarization gradient cooling (PG cooling) is a technique in laser cooling of atoms. It was proposed to explain the experimental observation of cooling below the doppler limit. Shortly after the theory was introduced experiments were performed that verified the theoretical predictions. While Doppler cooling allows atoms to be cooled to hundreds of microkelvin, PG cooling allows atoms to be cooled to a few microkelvin or less. The superposition of two counterpropagating beams of light with orthogonal polarizations creates a gradient where the polarization varies in space. The gradient depends on which type of polarization is used. Orthogonal linear polarizations (the lin⊥lin configuration) results in the polarization varying between linear and circular polarization in the range of half a wavelength. However, if orthogonal circular polarizations (the σ+σ− configuration) are used, the result is a linear polarization that rotates along the axis of propagation. Both configuration ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantum Computing
Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Though current quantum computers may be too small to outperform usual (classical) computers for practical applications, larger realizations are believed to be capable of solving certain computational problems, such as integer factorization (which underlies RSA encryption), substantially faster than classical computers. The study of quantum computing is a subfield of quantum information science. There are several models of quantum computation with the most widely used being quantum circuits. Other models include the quantum Turing machine, quantum annealing, and adiabatic quantum computation. Most models are based on the quantum bit, or "qubit", which is somewhat analogous to the bit in classical computation. A qubit can be in a 1 or 0 quantum s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magneto-optical Trap
A magneto-optical trap (MOT) is an apparatus which uses laser cooling and a spatially-varying magnetic field to create a trap which can produce samples of cold, trapped, neutral atoms. Temperatures achieved in a MOT can be as low as several microkelvin, depending on the atomic species, which is two or three times below the photon recoil limit. However, for atoms with an unresolved hyperfine structure, such as ^7\mathrm, the temperature achieved in a MOT will be higher than the Doppler cooling limit. A MOT is formed from the intersection of a weak quadrupolar spatially-varying magnetic field and six circularly-polarized red-detuned optical molasses beams. As atoms travel away from the field zero at the center of the trap (halfway between the coils), the spatially-varying Zeeman shift brings an atomic transition into resonance which gives rise to a scattering force that pushes the atoms back towards the center of the trap. This is why a MOT traps atoms, and because this force aris ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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