Abstract

The experimental discovery of sub-Doppler laser cooling was soon followed by theoretical descriptions that depended on optical pumping processes among the sublevels of multiply degenerate atomic ground states. These theories were based on polarization gradients in counterpropagating light beams. Later it was found that sub-Doppler cooling could also be achieved in the absence of polarization gradients when a weak transverse magnetic field was used for mixing eigenstates of the light-shift operator.

© 1993 Optical Society of America