12 Facts About Laser cooling

Laser cooling techniques combine atomic spectroscopy with the aforementioned mechanical effect of light to compress the velocity distribution of an ensemble of particles, thereby cooling the particles.

Laser cooling was separately introduced in 1975 by two different research groups: Hansch and Schawlow, and Wineland and Dehmelt.

These early proposals for laser cooling only relied on "scattering force", the name for the radiation pressure.

In later proposals, laser trapping, a variant of cooling which requires both scattering and a dipole force, would be introduced.

Laser cooling emphasized how this process could allow for long spectroscopic measurements without the atoms escaping the trap and proposed the overlapping of optical traps in order to study interactions between different atoms.

Around this time, laser cooling techniques had allowed for temperatures lowered to around 40 kelvins.

The major breakthroughs in the 70s and 80s in the use of laser light for cooling led to several improvements to preexisting technology and new discoveries with temperatures just above absolute zero.

The Laser cooling processes were utilized to make atomic clocks more accurate and to improve spectroscopic measurements, and led to the observation of a new state of matter at ultracold temperatures.

The principal condition for efficient Laser cooling is that the anti-Stokes emission rate to the final state be significantly larger than that to other states as well as the nonradiative relaxation rate.

The anti-Stokes Laser cooling effect was first demonstrated by Djeu and Whitney in CO2 gas.

Laser cooling is primarily used to create ultracold atoms for experiments in quantum physics.

Laser cooling has primarily been used on atoms, but recent progress has been made toward laser cooling more complex systems.