Laser can be used to cool and manipulate neutron atoms via momentum exchange between photons and atoms. Laser cooling and trapping is well established on alkali, alkali earth, and noble gas elements. Noble gases, with stable physical and chemical properties, no reactions with other elements, have great potential uses in cold collision, spectroscopy measurement, photo-association, atom optics, etc. However, trapping noble gas atoms is generally more difficult because of the lack of suitable UV lasers. Some of these problems will be overcome with future advances in UV laser technology. Excited by electron collisions, noble gas can reach the long life metastable state for the use of laser decelerating, focusing and trapping. In this paper some main methods which are used to achieve cooling and trapping metastable noble gas atoms are discussed.

Date Published: 26 January 2016
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 9796, Selected Papers of the Photoelectronic Technology Committee Conferences held November 2015, 97960D (26 January 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2229571

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9796:
Selected Papers of the Photoelectronic Technology Committee Conferences held November 2015
Weimin Bao; Yueguang Lv, Editor(s)