Abstract
We have developed a ``beam brightener'' in which several different laser cooling methods produce a highly monochromatic, unidirectional and intense beam of metastable Ne(3s;^3P_2) atoms. The beam brightener consists of four main stages. From an exited neon source we capture in a collimating section 5× 10^11 Ne(3s)/s from which ≈ 50 % is slowed to 100 m/s in a Zeeman slower. The final velocity distribution shows a width of 3.3 m/s uc(RMS,) corresponding to a temperature of 12 mK. A fraction of ≈ 25 % of these cold atoms is captured by a magneto-optic compressor and molded into a 0.7 mm uc(FWHM) wide atomic beam that contains up to 5× 10^10 Ne(3s)/s. The resulting density is 1.1× 10^9 Ne(3s)/cm^3. In the final step, a Doppler cooler is used to minimize the divergence of the beam to 10 mrad. This value will further improve once the Doppler cooler is replaced by a sub-Doppler cooler. We plan to use this ``bright beam'' to investigate the ionization probabilities in Ne(3s)+Ne(3s) collisions. Emphasis will be on the suppression of ionization when the atoms are spin-polarized. This has important implications for the possibilities of using metastable atoms for BEC-type experiments. Present adress: NIST
| Original language | English |
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| Pages (from-to) | 1367 |
| Number of pages | 1 |
| Journal | Bulletin of the American Physical Society |
| Volume | 43 |
| Publication status | Published - 1998 |
| Event | 29th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, DAMOP 1998 - Santa Fe, United States Duration: 27 May 1998 → 30 May 1998 Conference number: 29 |