Three-dimensional cavity Doppler cooling and cavity sideband cooling by coherent scattering - art. no. 033405

Laser cooling by coherent scattering inside an optical cavity, a method pro posed for cooling the motion of arbitrary particles that scatter light, is analyzed in terms of the modified emission spectrum. In contrast to convent ional Doppler cooling, this method invokes the two-photon Doppler effect al ong the direction of the momentum transferred in the scattering process. Th ree-dimensional cooling can therefore be achieved with a single optical cav ity. Both in the free-particle regime (cavity Doppler cooling) and in the s trong-confiment regime (cavity sideband cooling) the minimum temperature is determined by the resonator linewidth and independent of the atomic level structure. The cooling efficiency and volume are significantly enhanced in resonators with transverse-mode degeneracy, such as the confocal resonator.