Berlin 2001 – scientific programme
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Q: Quantenoptik
Q 17: Poster: Cooling and Trapping
Q 17.21: Poster
Wednesday, April 4, 2001, 12:30–15:00, AT2
Cooling of Calcium to the recoil limit — •Tomas Binnewies, Guido Wilpers, Uwe Sterr, Fritz Riehle, and Jürgen Helmcke — Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Bundesallee 100, 38116 Braunschweig, Germany
The narrow linewidths of the intercombination transitions
1S0 – 3P1 of
alkaline earth atoms allow novel applications and basic
research e. g. for optical clocks or
cold collision physics. This transition has been
successfully used to prepare ultracold
ensembles of Sr atoms [1]. To make use of the twenty times
smaller linewidth in Ca due to
the weak associated cooling force a modification of the
cooling scheme is required.
The method uses a repumping laser on the
4s4p 3P1 –
4s4d 1D2 transition to reduce the lifetime of the
3P1 state thereby
increasing the cooling force. The achievable temperature
should be limited by the
combined recoil limit of the involved transitions, leading to
an improvement of two orders of
magnitude compared to the current limit, the Doppler limit
on the strong cooling transition
4s2 1S0 – 4s4p 1P1.
We present theoretical and experimental investigations on
this cooling scheme and discuss the
perspectives of ultracold atomic ensembles for atom
interferometry and frequency standards.
Supported by the DFG under SFB 407.
[1] H. Katori et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 1116 (1999)