Production of ultrabright slow atomic beams using laser cooling

Abstract

We propose to use a three-step transverse and longitudinal cooling scheme, to compress and collimate a strongly diverging flow of metastable rare gas atoms. Simulations show that an atom beam flux of 1010 s-1 in a small diameter (<1 mm), well-collimated (divergence <10 mrad), slow (50 ms-1) atomic beam could be achieved. This technique can be extremely valuable in many areas of atomic physics, e.g. in (electron) spectroscopy and atomic collision physics where high beam densities are desirable.