A pulsed Sisyphus scheme for laser cooling of atomic (anti)hydrogen

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pulsed Sisyphus laser cooling method for atomic (anti)hydrogen, achieving rapid cooling to millikelvin temperatures with reduced losses, through numerical simulations of specific atomic transitions.

Contribution

It presents a novel pulsed Sisyphus cooling scheme tailored for (anti)hydrogen, demonstrating effective cooling to recoil-limited temperatures.

Findings

Cooling from ~1 K to millikelvin temperatures

Suppressed spin-flip loss

Manageable photoionization loss

Abstract

We propose a laser cooling technique in which atoms are selectively excited to a dressed metastable state whose light shift and decay rate are spatially correlated for Sisyphus cooling. The case of cooling magnetically trapped (anti)hydrogen with the 1S-2S-3P transitions using pulsed ultra violet and continuous-wave visible lasers is numerically simulated. We find a number of appealing features including rapid 3-dimensional cooling from ~1 K to recoil-limited, millikelvin temperatures, as well as suppressed spin-flip loss and manageable photoionization loss.