Studies on Optical Shielding of Cold Collisions / Estudo de Blindagem Óptica em Colisões Frias

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

1998

RESUMO

In this work, we showed that is possible to suppress most of the inelastic processes that may cause losses of atoms in a magneto-optical trap. Our results reveal that the process of optical shielding (demonstrated by our group, for the first time to photoassociative ionization - Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 1911 (1994)) is much more general than it was supposed. Even allowing the suppression of ground state collisions and probably any other inelastic process that happens at short internuclear distances. To achieve those results, it was necessary to develop a new trapping technique, which allows the study of cold collisions, even in traps whose confinement potential is small. Thanks to that technique it was possible, for the first time, to observe losses caused by hyperfine changing collisions, in a trap of sodium atoms operating in the D1 line (loaded from a vapor cell). That technique has still allowed us to measure the rate of cold collisions () for the D1 line trap, a result which, until now, did not exist in the literature. To verify the reliability of the results obtained by that technique, we also accomplished measures of  in the D2 line and compared those results with other existent ones in the literature (obtained by a different technique). The good agreement among those results, made us confident in saying that this technique, besides being very interesting in the study of shallow traps (due to the intensity of the trapping lasers, or due to the own nature of the trap), it is also quite reliable.

ASSUNTO(S)

colisões ultra-frias armadilhas magneto-ópticas neutral atom trapping and laser cooling aprisionamento de átomos neutros magneto-optical trap ultracold collision

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