6 research outputs found
Blue laser cooling transitions in Tm I
We have studied possible candidates for laser cooling transitions in
Tm in the spectral region 410 -- 420 nm. By means of saturation
absorption spectroscopy we have measured the hyperfine structure and rates of
two nearly closed cycling transitions from the ground state
to upper states
at
410.6 nm and
at
420.4 nm and evaluated the life times of the excited levels as 15.9(8) ns and
48(6) ns respectively. Decay rates from these levels to neighboring
opposite-parity levels are evaluated by means of Hartree-Fock calculations. We
conclude, that the strong transition at 410.6 nm has an optical leak rate of
less then and can be used for efficient laser cooling of
Tm from a thermal atomic beam. The hyperfine structure of two other
even-parity levels which can be excited from the ground state at 409.5 nm and
418.9 nm is also measured by the same technique. In addition we give a
calculated value of s for the rate of magnetic-dipole transition
at 1.14 m between the fine structure levels
of the ground state which can be
considered as a candidate for applications in atomic clocks.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
Recommended from our members
Phase-Coherent Synthesis of Optical Frequencies and Waveforms
Precision phase control of an ultrawide-bandwidth optical-frequency comb has produced remarkable and unexpected progress in both areas of optical-frequency metrology and ultrafast optics. A frequency comb (with 100 MHz spacing) spanning an entire optical octave (\u3e300 THz) has been produced, corresponding to millions of marks on a frequency “ruler” that are stable at the Hz level. The precision comb has been used to establish a simple optical clock based on an optical transition of iodine molecules, providing an rf clock signal with a frequency stability comparable to that of an optical standard, and which is superior to almost all conventional rf sources. To realize a high-power cw optical frequency synthesizer, a separate, widely tunable single-frequency cw laser has been employed to randomly access the stabilized optical comb and lock to any desired comb component. Carrier-envelope phase stabilization of few-cycle optical pulses has recently been realized. This advance in femtosecond technology is important for both extreme non-linear optics and optical-frequency metrology. With two independent femtosecond lasers, we have not only synchronized their relative pulse timing at the femtosecond level, but have also phase-locked their carrier frequencies, thus establishing phase coherence between the two lasers. By coherently stitching the optical bandwidth together, a “synthesized” pulse has been generated with its 2nd-order autocorrelation signal displaying a shorter width than those of the two “parent” lasers
Ultracold metastable helium-4 and helium-3 gases
We discuss our work to obtain a condensate containing more than 107 atoms and the first degenerate Fermi gas in a metastable state. Sympathetic cooling with Helium-4 is used to cool 106 Helium-3 atoms to a temperature T/TF < 0.5. The ultracold bosonic and fermionic gases have been used to observe the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect for both isotopes, showing bunching for the bosons and antibunching for the fermions. A proposal for high resolution spectroscopy at 1.557 μm, connecting both metastable states directly, is discussed at the end