Three Mechanisms Of Laser Cooling: Theoretical Analysis

Laser cooling is widely applied in science and technique, such as Bose-Einstein condensation, verification for general relativity theory, atomic frequency scale and atomic interferometer etc. The temperature of atoms in the optical molasses could be cooled to the Doppler limit, and through weakening the laser intensity and increasing the detuning of the laser from the resonant frequency, the atoms could be further cooled below the Doppler limit. By velocity selection, one could get an atomic source with a narrow distribution in velocity and challenge the recoil limit temperature. Although some parts of the atoms are lost, the temperature of the remaining atoms, which have a uniform velocity, is quite low compared to the former.It discusses three mechanisms of laser cooling in this paper: the Doppler cooling mechanism, the Sub-Doppler cooling mechanism and the Sub-recoil cooling mechanism. The Doppler cooling which makes atoms slowdown is based on the radiation pressure of the laser; The Sub-Doppler cooling slows atoms down on the basis of polarization gradient forces caused by motive inductions; The Sub-recoil cooling including the coherent population trapping cooling and the Raman laser cooling, gets atoms with a slice velocity distribution depended on the velocity selection.It presents the analytical solutions of the three-level equations on the velocity-selective stimulated Raman transitions in this paper, and concludes the principle of selecting atoms with a uniform velocity out of an initial distribution. In the semi-classical theory and dipole approximation, we gets the evolution equations of the interaction of the three-level atoms with the two-photon Raman laser system, and the velocity parameter are also taken into account in the wave function. For weak lasers and large detunings, the three-level equations degenerate into two-level equations. Through transforming two-level equations into constant coefficient equations by substitution it gives the solutions of them. The theoretical analysis corresponds with the experimental results generally. It also generalizes a few concepts obscure in some papers systematically, such as ignoring the magnetic field component in the interaction Hamiltonian, the choice of visible light for laser and rotating wave approximation etc.