Doppler Cooling and Trapping on Forbidden Transitions

Abstract

Ultracold atoms at temperatures close to the recoil limit have been achieved by extending Doppler cooling to forbidden transitions. A cloud of 40Ca atoms has been cooled and trapped to a temperature as low as 6μK by operating a magnetooptical trap on the spin-forbidden intercombination transition. Quenching the long-lived excited state with an additional laser enhanced the scattering rate by a factor of 15, while a high selectivity in velocity was preserved. With this method, more than 10% of precooled atoms from a standard magnetooptical trap have been transferred to the ultracold trap. Monte Carlo simulations of the cooling process are in good agreement with the experiments. © 2001 The American Physical Society.