Quasi one-dimensional diffuse laser cooling of atoms

Abstract

We demonstrate experimentally the generation of one-dimensional cold gases of 87 Rb atoms by diffuse laser cooling (DLC). A horizontal slender vacuum glass tube with length of 105 cm and diameter of 2 cm is used in our experiment. The diffuse laser light inside the tube, which is generated by multi-reflection of injected lasers, cools the background vapor atoms. With 250 mW of cooling light and 50 mW of repumping light, an evenly distributed meter-long profile of atom cloud is obtained. We observe a factor 4 improvement on the atomic OD for a typical cooling duration of 170 ms and a sub-Doppler atomic temperature of 25 µk. The maximum number of detected cold atoms remain constant for a free-fall duration of 30 ms. Such samples are ideal for many quantum optical experiments involving electromagnetically induced transparency, electronically highly excited (Rydberg) atoms and quantum precision measurements.