Related papers: Molecular Laser-Cooling in a Dynamically Tunable R…
Laser cooling to sub-Doppler temperatures by optical molasses is thought to be inhibited in atoms with unresolved, near-degenerate hyperfine structure in the excited state. We demonstrate that such cooling is possible in one to three…
Arrays of single ultracold molecules promise to be a powerful platform for many applications ranging from quantum simulation to precision measurement. Here we report on the creation of an optical tweezer array of single ultracold CaF…
Doppler cooling with lasers is essential to ions' trapping and also a preliminary step towards achievement of ultracold ions. Due to lack of effective tools, experimentally monitoring the ions' temperature and the laser-ion coupling is…
We consider a laser cooling and trapping of alkaline-earth and similar atoms in a bichromatic field resonant to a closed optical transition $^1S_0 \to \, ^1P_1$ or $^1S_0 \to \, ^3P_1$. It is shown that new kinetic effects emerge compared…
We report the rapid accelerated thermalisation of Potassium 39 K atoms loaded in a magnetic trap, in the presence of a single dipole trap beam. More than an order of magnitude reduction in the thermalisation time, to less than a second, is…
We demonstrate a three-dimensional magneto-optical trap (MOT) of a metal hydride molecule, CaH. We are able to scatter $\sim$$10^{4}$ photons with vibrational loss covered up to vibrational quantum number $\nu=2$. This allows us to laser…
Sympathetic laser cooling is a key concept in precision spectroscopy and quantum state control of charged particles. Significant challenges arise in the metrologically relevant case where the effective interaction between the particles is…
Cooling of molecules via free-space dissipative scattering of photons is thought not to be practicable due to the inherently large number of Raman loss channels available to molecules and the prohibitive expense of building multiple…
We systematically investigate the dependence of the temperature of cold cesium atoms of polarization gradient cooling (PGC) in optical molasses on experimental parameters, which contain changing modes of cooling laser, PGC interaction time,…
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…
Continuous wave (CW) lasers are the enabling technology for producing ultracold atoms and molecules through laser cooling and trapping. The resulting pristine samples of slow moving particles are the de facto starting point for both…
Levitated optomechanical systems, and particularly particles trapped in vacuum, provide unique platforms for studying the mechanical behavior of objects well-isolated from their environment. Ultimately, such systems may enable the study of…
Direct laser cooling of molecules has made significant progress in recent years. However, the selective cooling and manipulation of molecules based on their isotopic composition, which is ubiquitous in atomic laser cooling, has not yet been…
We demonstrate a Magneto-Optical Trap (MOT) configuration which employs optical forces due to light scattering between electronically excited states of the atom. With the standard MOT laser beams propagating along the {\it x}- and {\it y}-…
We demonstrate the possibility of three-dimensional cooling of neutral atoms by illuminating them with two counterpropagating laser beams of mutually orthogonal linear polarization, where one of the lasers is a speckle field, i.e. a highly…
We theoretically analyze the cooling dynamics of an atom which is tightly trapped inside a high-finesse optical resonator. Cooling is achieved by suitably tailored scattering processes, in which the atomic dipole transition either scatters…
We propose a method of stimulated laser cooling of diatomic molecules by counter-propagating $\pi$-trains of ultrashort laser pulses. The cooling cycles occur on the rovibrational transitions inside the same ground electronic manifold, thus…
Recent theoretical investigations have indicated that rapid optical cycling should be feasible in complex polyatomic molecules with diverse constituents, geometries and symmetries. However, as a composite molecular mass grows, so does the…
We demonstrate sub-Doppler cooling of 40K on the D_1 atomic transition. Using a gray molasses scheme, we efficiently cool a compressed cloud of 6.5x10^8 atoms from ~ 4\mK to 20uK in 8 ms. After transfer in a quadrupole magnetic trap, we…
Some practical improvements are proposed for the "optical-shaker" laser-cooling technique [I.S. Averbukh and Y. Prior, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 153002 (2005)]. The improved technique results in an increased cooling rate and decreases the…