An optical trap for atoms on the basis of counter-propagating bichromatic light waves

Abstract

It has been shown that the field of counter-propagating bichromatic light waves can form a one-dimension trap for atoms. The confinement of an ensemble of atoms in the trap and their simultaneous cooling to a temperature close to the Doppler cooling limit can be achieved without using auxiliary fields, by properly choosing the detuning of monochromatic components from the atomic transition frequency. The specific numerical simulation is carried out for sodium atoms. A possible application of such a trap for the confinement and the cooling of molecules with an almost diagonal array of Franck–Condon factors is discussed.