Abstract

Laser cooling on transitions with a linewidth Γ much narrower than the recoil shift ℏk²/m is studied numerically according to a full quantum-mechanical treatment of the photon recoil. We propose and investigate a broadband spectral configuration that has the purposes of (1) shortening the long cooling time characteristic for monochromatic laser cooling on a slow transition and (2) reducing the kinetic energy of the stationary momentum distributions considerably below the one-photon recoil energy (ℏk)²/2m. The energies of the computed stationary distributions are limited only by the energy uncertainty of the narrow transition ℏΓ ≪ (ℏk)²/2m. Applications to laser cooling of alkaline earths on the narrow intercombination lines are discussed.

© 1989 Optical Society of America

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