Counting Cold Collisions
Quantum Physics
2007-05-23 v2
Abstract
We have experimentally explored a novel possibility to study exoergic cold atomic collisions. Trapping of small countable atom numbers in a shallow magneto-optical trap and monitoring of their temporal dynamics allows us to directly observe isolated two-body atomic collisions and provides detailed information on loss statistics. A substantial fraction of such cold collisional events has been found to result in the loss of one atom only. We have also observed for the first time a strong optical suppression of ground-state hyperfine-changing collisions in the trap by its repump laser field.
Cite
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/9910120,
title = {Counting Cold Collisions},
author = {B. Ueberholz and S. Kuhr and D. Frese and D. Meschede and V. Gomer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/9910120},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
LaTeX 2e, 5 pages, 4 Postscript figures