Desenvolvimento de fontes laser, espectroscopia de alta resolução e resfriamento e aprisionamento magneto-optico de atomos de calcio

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2002

RESUMO

In this work, we report on an experimental system for laser cooling and magneto-optical trapping of calcium atoms, the development of the laser sources for this system, and a spectroscopic analysis of calcium transitions in hollow cathode electric discharges. In the case of calcium, the most efficient optical transition for the atom motion manipulation by radiation pressure is the 1 S0- 1 P1 at 423 nm. One of the lasers sources that we developed at this wavelength consists on a frequency doubled and stabilized Ti:Sapphire laser. The frequency of this laser is locked to the resonance of a Fabry-Perot reference cavity. The second harmonic is generated by nonlinear conversion in a potassium niobate crystal inside an external power enhancement cavity. We investigate the use of calcium hollow cathode lamps as high resolution spectroscopic tools. The variation of the electrical discharge caused by the laser excitation, the optogalvanic effect, is a high sensitivity technique that greatly simplifies the detection and tuning on very weak atomic transitions, as the 1 S0-3 P1 at 657 nm. The system for cooling and trapping of calcium atoms is the last topic reported in this work. In this system, atoms from a thermal atomic beam are first cooled by the Zeeman deceleration technique and then trapped on a magneto-optical trap. We employed an alternative scheme for Zeeman deceleration which uses a laser beam at the same frequency of the trapping laser beams. We analyzed the variation of the steady state number of trapped atoms with several parameters, as magnetic field gradient, detuning and intensity of the trapping and decelerating laser beams. We also analyzed the time evolution of the number of trapped atoms. This analysis showed that the trap storage time is limited by losses related with the optical pumping of calcium metastable levels. These optical pumping losses are much larger than the losses caused by binary collisions between the cold atoms. In this regime, the non-exponential behavior of the atom number is very difficult to observe. However, we noticed that it is possible to extract information on the cold collision loss rate by comparing the exponential time constants of the trap load and the decay curves

ASSUNTO(S)

lasers otica não-linear atomos - resfriamento espectroscopia de alta resolução

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