Radiative collisional heating at the Doppler limit for laser-cooled magnesium atoms

Abstract

We report Monte Carlo wave function simulation results on cold collisions between magnesium atoms in a strong red-detuned laser field. This is the normal situation e.g. in magneto-optical traps (MOT). The Doppler limit heating rate due to radiative collisions is calculated for Mg-24 atoms in a magneto-optical trap based on the singlet S_0 - singlet P_1 atomic laser cooling transition. We find that radiative heating does not seem to affect the Doppler limit in this case. We also describe a channelling mechanism due to the missing Q branch in the excitation scheme, which could lead to a suppression of inelastic collisions, and find that this mechanism is not present in our simulation results due to the multistate character of the excitation process.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX 4; v2 contains minor revisions based on referee comments (5 pages