Gray molasses on the D2 transition of the 87Rb atoms

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• Sara Rosi (LENS, Florence)
• Friday 27 January 2017, 12:00-13:00
• Physics East 217.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Giovanni Barontini.

Laser cooling is essential for most cold atoms experiments, and with the advent of Bose-Einstein condensates it gradually turned into a fundamental tool. The existence of dark states opens up the possibility of developing sub-Doppler cooling procedures where the atoms are cooled down to a few recoil temperatures and optically pumped in states decoupled from the light field. Here we present the implementation and the characterization of a gray molasses cooling procedure on the D2 line of 87Rb atoms. We show the dependence of the temperature and of the number of atoms as a function of several experimental parameters as the laser light frequencies, the time duration of the process and the optical intensity, and report the comparison with the standard bright molasses cooling procedure. We also show experimentally that coherence of repumping and cooling light is required. The main achievement is a sample of 87Rb atoms pumped in the F = 1 hyperfine state - crucial for our future experiments – with a final temperature of 4 μK and a gain in the phase space density of about an order of magnitude with respect to the bright molasses.

This talk is part of the Cold atoms series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cold atoms
• Physics East 217

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