Frankfurt 2006 – scientific programme

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A: Atomphysik

A 11: Ultrakalte Atomphysik III

A 11.6: Talk

Wednesday, March 15, 2006, 11:55–12:10, H6

Laser Cooling of Barium — •Subhadeep De, Umakanth Dammalapati, Aran Mol, Klaus Jungmann, and Lorenz Willmann — KVI, Zernikelaan 25, 9747AA Groningen, The Netherlands

Laser cooled and trapped atoms are increasingly used worldwide for variety of high precision experiments. The TRIµP (Trapped Radioactive Isotopes: µicro-Laboratories for Fundamental Physics) at KVI is aimed to investigate new physics beyond the Standard Model by precision measurement of fundamental interactions and symmetries. Our approach is the search for permanent electric dipole moment (edm) in atom where radium (Ra) is a promising candidate. Its dipole moment is enhanced by orders of magnitude due to close lying states of opposite parity, i.e. 3P1 and 3D2 [1]. Radium is also interesting for measurements of atomic parity violation effects [2].

Since radium has a similar level structure to barium, we investigate as a first step laser cooling of barium. We slow down atoms from a thermal barium beam using 1S0-1P1 transition at 553.7 nm as a cooling cycle. Since the rather strong leakage into metastable D-states, the use of repumping lasers is essential (1130 nm and 1500 nm). We show that we increase the flux of atoms at low velocities relative to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. We work on confining these slowed atoms in a MOT.

[1] V.V. Flambaum, Phys. Rev. A 60, R2611 (1999);V.A. Dzuba et al., Phys. Rev. A 61, 062509 (2000). [2] V.A. Dzuba et al., Phys. Rev. A 63, 062101 (2001).