PRODUCTION OF ULTRABRIGHT SLOW ATOMIC-BEAMS USING LASER COOLING

We propose to use a three-step transverse and longitudinal cooling sch eme, to compress and collimate a strongly diverging flow of metastable rare gas atoms. Simulations show that an atom beam flux of 10(10) s(- 1) in a small diameter (<1 mm), well-collimated (divergence <10 mrad), slow (50 ms(-1)) atomic beam could be achieved. This technique can be extremely valuable in many areas of atomic physics, e.g. in (electron ) spectroscopy and atomic collision physics where high beam densities are desirable.