Radiation Pressure on Atoms: Laser Cooling and Intense Field Effects.

Abstract : It is conventional to describe the motion of an atom in a laser field (and other D.C fields) by a Fokker-Planck equation which is characterized by a force and a diffusion coefficient. Gordon and Ashkin have obtained a result for the diffusion coefficient in a spherically symmetric approximation. We have recently treated it as a second order tensor and have gotten a different result. The tensor has three terms. The leading term arises from the recoil of the atom during fluorescence, the second comes from gradients of the laser intensity and the D.C. fields and the last comes from a combination of the recoil term and gradients. The trace of our leading term agrees with the result of Gordon and Ashkin but there is no agreement at all with the other terms. The calculation was performed for a traveling wave laser and is being extended now to a standing wave laser by a graduate student. The experiment being undertaken here will use a swept laser frequency to compensate for the change in resonance frequency (due to the Doppler effect) of the atom as it slows down.