Squeezing Atomic Vibrations In An Optical Lattice. A New Mechanism Of Optical Cooling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel optical lattice-based method for squeezing atomic vibrations, enabling reduction of atomic momentum variance to recoil levels and achieving recoil energy cooling.

Contribution

It presents a new mechanism for optical cooling of atomic vibrations using an optical lattice and laser pulse techniques, achieving unprecedented momentum squeezing.

Findings

Atomic momentum variance reduced to recoil momentum

Cooling to recoil energy demonstrated

New optical cooling mechanism proposed

Abstract

We propose a new method to obtain a squeezed matter field of atomic vibrations by use of an optical lattice, and the laser pulse technique of Garrett et al used for acoustic phonons [1]. We show that it is possible to reduce the variance of atomic momentum to a value as low as the recoil momentum. Consequently, cooling to recoil energy can be achieved.