Darmstadt 2008 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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A: Fachverband Atomphysik
A 9: Ultracold atoms I (jointly with Q)
A 9.7: Vortrag
Dienstag, 11. März 2008, 15:30–15:45, 2F
Laser Cooling and Trapping of a Leaky System: Barium — •Subhadeep De, Joost van den Berg, Aran Mol, Klaus Jungmann, and Lorenz Willmann — KVI, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Heavy alkaline earth elements like radium are excellent candidates to test fundamental symmetries by searches for permanent electric dipole moments and atomic parity violation. Sensitive experiments require the trapping of these isotopes. Nevertheless, the two electron atoms have no simple two-level system for laser cooling due to the strong transitions between the singulet and the triplet system. The strongest transition from the ground state 1S0-1P1 show a leak of 1:500 to metastable D-states. We have studied such a system with barium, where the branching into the D-states is 1:330(30). Repumping from these states uses the same excited state as the cooling transition, which leeds to coherent Raman transitions. Trapping and cooling of barium requires a set of seven lasers running at the same time. We report on the first successful trapping of barium in a magneto optical trap. The performance of the cooling and trapping will be discussed.