Photoassociative cooling and trapping of a pair of interacting atoms

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a laser cooling method for pairs of interacting atoms using photoassociation lasers, enabling trapping of their center-of-mass motion in spin-dependent potentials, especially effective for narrow-line transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel laser cooling and trapping scheme for atom pairs via photoassociation lasers, expanding control over interacting atomic systems.

Findings

Effective cooling of atom pairs demonstrated with numerical simulations.

Center-of-mass trapping achieved in spin-dependent potentials.

Scheme is particularly effective for narrow-line PA transitions.

Abstract

We show that it is possible to cool interacting pairs of atoms by a lin $\perp$ lin Sisyphus-like laser cooling scheme using counter-propagating photoassociation (PA) lasers. It is shown that the center-of-mass motion (c.m.) of atom pairs can be trapped in molecular spin-dependent periodic potentials generated by the lasers. The proposed scheme is most effective for narrow-line PA transitions. We illustrate this with numerical calculations using fermionic $^{171}$Yb atoms as an example.