560 research outputs found
Light forces in ultracold photoassociation
We study the time-resolved photoassociation of ultracold sodium in an optical
dipole trap. The photoassociation laser excites pairs of atoms to molecular
states of large total angular momentum at high intensities (above 20
kW/cm). Such transitions are generally suppressed at ultracold
temperatures by the centrifugal barriers for high partial waves. Time-resolved
ionization measurements reveal that the atoms are accelerated by the dipole
potential of the photoassociation beam. We change the collision energy by
varying the potential depth, and observe a strong variation of the
photoassociation rate. These results demonstrate the important role of light
forces in cw photoassociation at high intensities.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure
Trapping of Neutral Rubidium with a Macroscopic Three-Phase Electric Trap
We trap neutral ground-state rubidium atoms in a macroscopic trap based on
purely electric fields. For this, three electrostatic field configurations are
alternated in a periodic manner. The rubidium is precooled in a magneto-optical
trap, transferred into a magnetic trap and then translated into the electric
trap. The electric trap consists of six rod-shaped electrodes in cubic
arrangement, giving ample optical access. Up to 10^5 atoms have been trapped
with an initial temperature of around 20 microkelvin in the three-phase
electric trap. The observations are in good agreement with detailed numerical
simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Instability Heating of Sympathetically-Cooled Ions in a Linear Paul Trap
Sympathetic laser cooling of ions stored within a linear-geometry, radio
frequency, electric-quadrupole trap has been investigated using computational
and theoretical techniques. The simulation, which allows 5 sample ions to
interact with 35 laser-cooled atomic ions, revealed an instability heating
mechanism, which can prevent ions below a certain critical mass from being
sympathetically cooled. This critical mass can however be varied by changing
the trapping field parameters thus allowing ions with a very large range of
masses to be sympathetically cooled using a single ion species. A theoretical
explanation of this instability heating mechanism is presented which predicts
that the cooling-heating boundary in trapping parameter space is a line of
constant (ion trap stability coefficient), a result supported by the
computational results. The threshold value of depends on the masses of
the interacting ions. A functional form of this dependence is given
Doppler cooling and trapping on forbidden transitions
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 6 \mu K by operating a
magneto-optical 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 pre-cooled atoms from a standard
magneto-optical trap have been transferred to the ultracold trap. Monte-Carlo
simulations of the cooling process are in good agreement with the experiments
Collisions of cold magnesium atoms in a weak laser field
We use quantum scattering methods to calculate the light-induced collisional
loss of laser-cooled and trapped magnesium atoms for detunings up to 30 atomic
linewidths to the red of the 1S_0-1P_1 cooling transition. Magnesium has no
hyperfine structure to complicate the theoretical studies. We evaluate both the
radiative and nonradiative mechanisms of trap loss. The radiative escape
mechanism via allowed 1Sigma_u excitation is dominant for more than about one
atomic linewidth detuning. Molecular vibrational structure due to
photoassociative transitions to bound states begins to appear beyond about ten
linewidths detuning.Comment: 4 pages with 3 embedded figure
Functional neuroimaging effects of recently discovered genetic risk loci for schizophrenia and polygenic risk profile in five RDoC subdomains
Recently, 125 loci with genome-wide support for association with schizophrenia
were identified. We investigated the impact of these variants and their
accumulated genetic risk on brain activation in five neurocognitive domains of
the Research Domain Criteria (working memory, reward processing, episodic
memory, social cognition and emotion processing). In 578 healthy subjects we
tested for association (i) of a polygenic risk profile score (RPS) including
all single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) reaching genome-wide significance
in the recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) meta-analysis and (ii) of
all independent genome-wide significant loci separately that showed sufficient
distribution of all allelic groups in our sample (105 SNPs). The RPS was
nominally associated with perigenual anterior cingulate and posterior
cingulate/precuneus activation during episodic memory (PFWE(ROI)=0.047) and
social cognition (PFWE(ROI)=0.025), respectively. Single SNP analyses revealed
that rs9607782, located near EP300, was significantly associated with amygdala
recruitment during emotion processing (PFWE(ROI)=1.63 × 10−4, surpassing
Bonferroni correction for the number of SNPs). Importantly, this association
was replicable in an independent sample (N=150; PFWE(ROI)<0.025). Other SNP
effects previously associated with imaging phenotypes were nominally
significant, but did not withstand correction for the number of SNPs tested.
To assess whether there was true signal within our data, we repeated single
SNP analyses with 105 randomly chosen non-schizophrenia-associated variants,
observing fewer significant results and lower association probabilities.
Applying stringent methodological procedures, we found preliminary evidence
for the notion that genetic risk for schizophrenia conferred by rs9607782 may
be mediated by amygdala function. We critically evaluate the potential caveats
of the methodological approaches employed and offer suggestions for future
studies
All Optical Formation of an Atomic Bose-Einstein Condensate
We have created a Bose-Einstein condensate of 87Rb atoms directly in an
optical trap. We employ a quasi-electrostatic dipole force trap formed by two
crossed CO_2 laser beams. Loading directly from a sub-doppler laser-cooled
cloud of atoms results in initial phase space densities of ~1/200.
Evaporatively cooling through the BEC transition is achieved by lowering the
power in the trapping beams over ~ 2 s. The resulting condensates are F=1
spinors with 3.5 x 10^4 atoms distributed between the m_F = (-1,0,1) states.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let
Pion and Sigma Polarizabilities and Radiative Transitions
Fermilab E781 plans measurements of gamma-Sigma and -pion
interactions using a 600 GeV beam of Sigmas and pions, and a virtual photon
target. Pion polarizabilities and radiative transitions will be measured in
this experiment. The former can test a precise prediction of chiral symmetry;
the latter for a_1(1260) ----> pi + gamma is important for understanding the
polarizability. The experiment also measures polarizabilities and radiative
transitions for Sigma hyperons. The polarizabilities can test predictions of
baryon chiral perturbation theory. The radiative transitions to the
Sigma*(1385) provide a measure of the magnetic moment of the s-quark. Previous
experimental and theoretical results for gamma-pi and gamma-Sigma interactions
are given. The E781 experiment is described.Comment: 13 pages text (tex), Tel Aviv U. Preprint TAUP 2204-94, uses
Springer-Verlag TEX macro package lecproc.cmm (appended at end of tex file,
following \byebye), which requires extracting lecproc.cmm and putting this
file in your directory in addition to the tex file (mmcd.tex) before tex
processing. lecproc.cmm should be used following instructions and guidelines
available from Springer-Verlag. Submitted to the Proceedings of Workshop on
Chiral Dynamics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 1994, Eds. A.
Bernstein, B. Holstein. Replaced Oct. 4 to add TAUP preprint number. Replaced
Oct. 12 to correct Pb target thickness from 1.3% interaction to 0.3
Effects of urban living environments on mental health in adults
Urban-living individuals are exposed to many environmental factors that may combine and interact to influence mental health. While individual factors of an urban environment have been investigated in isolation, no attempt has been made to model how complex, real-life exposure to living in the city relates to brain and mental health, and how this is moderated by genetic factors. Using the data of 156,075 participants from the UK Biobank, we carried out sparse canonical correlation analyses to investigate the relationships between urban environments and psychiatric symptoms. We found an environmental profile of social deprivation, air pollution, street network and urban land-use density that was positively correlated with an affective symptom group (r = 0.22, P perm < 0.001), mediated by brain volume differences consistent with reward processing, and moderated by genes enriched for stress response, including CRHR1, explaining 2.01% of the variance in brain volume differences. Protective factors such as greenness and generous destination accessibility were negatively correlated with an anxiety symptom group (r = 0.10, P perm < 0.001), mediated by brain regions necessary for emotion regulation and moderated by EXD3, explaining 1.65% of the variance. The third urban environmental profile was correlated with an emotional instability symptom group (r = 0.03, P perm < 0.001). Our findings suggest that different environmental profiles of urban living may influence specific psychiatric symptom groups through distinct neurobiological pathways
Quantum and Semiclassical Calculations of Cold Atom Collisions in Light Fields
We derive and apply an optical Bloch equation (OBE) model for describing
collisions of ground and excited laser cooled alkali atoms in the presence of
near-resonant light. Typically these collisions lead to loss of atoms from
traps. We compare the results obtained with a quantum mechanical complex
potential treatment, semiclassical Landau-Zener models with decay, and a
quantum time-dependent Monte-Carlo wave packet (MCWP) calculation. We formulate
the OBE method in both adiabatic and diabatic representations. We calculate the
laser intensity dependence of collision probabilities and find that the
adiabatic OBE results agree quantitatively with those of the MCWP calculation,
and qualitatively with the semiclassical Landau-Zener model with delayed decay,
but that the complex potential method or the traditional Landau-Zener model
fail in the saturation limit.Comment: 21 pages, RevTex, 7 eps figures embedded using psfig, see also
http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~kasuomin
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