Related papers: Self-stabilization of light sails by damped intern…
Lightsails using Earth-based lasers for propulsion require passive stabilization to stay within the beam. This can be achieved through the sail's scattering properties, creating optical restoring forces and torques. Undamped restoring…
Lightsails are promising spacecraft that can traverse interstellar distances within decades via radiation-pressure propulsion from high-power lasers. The envisioned missions crucially rely on the sail being confined within the propelling…
A lightsail can be accelerated to ultra-high speed by the radiation pressure of a laser having an intensity of the order of GW/m$^2$, which though presents a critical challenge in the thermal management of lightsails. In this letter, we…
The stability of a light sail riding on a laser beam is analyzed both analytically and numerically. Conical sails on Gaussian beams, which have been studied in the past, are shown to be unstable without active control or additional…
Lightsails are a promising spacecraft concept that can reach relativistic speeds via propulsion by laser light, allowing travel to nearby stars within a human lifetime. The success of a lightsail mission requires that any motion in the…
We consider the phase stability of a local oscillator (or laser) locked to a cavity QED system comprised of atoms with an ultra-narrow optical transition. The atoms are cooled to millikelvin temperatures and then released into the optical…
A superintense laser pulse illuminating a thin solid-density foil can, in principle, accelerate the entire foil, therefore yielding dense, collimated, and quasi-monoenergetic ion beams. These unique features render radiation pressure…
The semiclassical theory of laser cooling is applied for the analysis of cooling of unbound atoms with the values of the ground and exited state angular moments 1/2 in a one-dimensional nondissipative optical lattice. We show that in the…
The ability to cool single ions, atomic ensembles, and more recently macroscopic degrees of freedom down to the quantum groundstate has generated considerable progress and perspectives in Basic and Technological Science. These major…
A polarizable body moving in an external electromagnetic field will slow down. This effect is referred to as radiation damping and is analogous to Doppler cooling in atomic physics. Using the principles of special relativity we derive an…
Laser cooling is fundamental to quantum computation and metrology with trapped ions, and can occupy a majority of runtime in current systems. A key limitation to cooling arises from unwanted carrier excitation, which in typically used…
A laser cooling method for trapped atoms is described which achieves ground state cooling by exploiting quantum interference in a driven Lambda-shaped arrangement of atomic levels. The scheme is technically simpler than existing methods of…
We study a single incoherently pumped atom moving within an optical high-Q resonator in the strong coupling regime. Using a semiclassical description for the atom and field dynamics, we derive a closed system of differential equations to…
Recently, the existence of robust three-dimensional light bullets (LBs) was predicted theoretically in the output of a laser coupled to a distant saturable absorber. In this manuscript, we analyze the stability and the range of existence of…
We study the steady state motion of a single trapped ion oscillator driven to the nonlinear regime. Damping is achieved via Doppler laser-cooling. The ion motion is found to be well described by the Duffing oscillator model with an…
We study the laser cooling of one atom in an harmonic trap beyond the Lamb-Dicke regime. By using sequences of laser pulses of different detunings we show that the atom can be confined into just one state of the trap, either the ground…
Laser sails propelled by gigawatt-scale ground-based laser arrays have the potential to reach relativistic speeds, traversing the solar system in hours and reaching nearby stars in years. Here, we describe the danger interplanetary dust…
Laser cooling is fundamental to quantum computing and metrology using atomic systems. Precise control often requires cooling atoms' motional degrees of freedom to the quantum ground state, imposing operation time and architectural…
The structural stability of a lightsail under the laser flux necessary for interstellar flight is studied analytically and numerically. A sinusoidal perturbation is introduced into a two-dimensional thin-film sail to determine if the sail…
We present a microscopic laser model for many atoms coupled to a single cavity mode, including the light forces resulting from atom-field momentum exchange. Within a semiclassical description, we solve the equations for atomic motion and…