Proposal for continuous white-light cooling of an atomic beam

Abstract

Deceleration and cooling of an atomic beam by a counterpropagating beam of white light is studied by numerically integrating the classical equations of motion. It is shown that nonresonant scattering limits the cooling, but this limitation can be overcome by the addition of a monochromatic, copropagating light beam. Such a scheme can continuously cool about 70% of a thermal atomic beam to a temperature of the order of 50 mK.