ATOM COOLING AND TRAPPING BY DISORDER

We demonstrate the possibility of three-dimensional cooling of neutral atoms by illuminating them with two counterpropagating laser beams of mutually orthogonal linear polarization, where one of the lasers is a speckle field, i.e., a highly disordered but stationary coherent ligh t field. This configuration gives rise to atom cooling in the transver se plane via a Sisyphus cooling mechanism similar to the one known in standard two-dimensional optical lattices formed by several plane lase r waves. However, striking differences occur in the spatial diffusion coefficients as well as in local properties of the trapped atoms. [S10 50-2947(98)06411-7].