Sisyphus cooling in a continuously loaded trap

TL;DR

This paper presents a method combining continuous Sisyphus cooling with a loading mechanism to efficiently slow, cool, and accumulate atoms from a guided beam, significantly increasing phase-space density.

Contribution

It introduces a novel continuous cooling and loading scheme that enhances atom accumulation from diverse initial conditions, enabling high-density atomic samples.

Findings

Achieved a nine orders of magnitude increase in phase-space density.

Demonstrated effective cooling from a wide range of initial beam conditions.

Enabled conditions suitable for evaporative cooling despite initial limitations.

Abstract

We demonstrate continuous Sisyphus cooling combined with a continuous loading mechanism used to efficiently slow down and accumulate atoms from a guided beam. While the loading itself is based on a single slowing step, applying a radio frequency field forces the atoms to repeat this step many times resulting in a so-called Sisyphus cooling. This extension allows efficient loading and cooling of atoms from a wide range of initial beam conditions. We study the interplay of the continuous loading and simultaneous Sisyphus cooling in different density regimes. In the case of a low density flux we observe a relative gain in phase-space density of nine orders of magnitude. This makes the presented scheme an ideal tool for reaching collisional densities enabling evaporative cooling - in spite of unfavourable initial conditions.