Cesium gas strongly confined in one dimension: Sideband cooling and collisional properties

Abstract

The 1D sideband cooling of cesium atoms in a far-detuned optical lattice was investigated. First, light-induced atom losses were observed. Second, cooling of the weakly confined degrees of freedom by collisions loses its efficiency around kBTωosc. According to this, a dynamic method involving changes of the high oscillation frequency via polarization rotation of one of the trapping beams was proposed and implemented. It was shown that the zero energy scattering resonance of cesium was essentially unaffected in the temperature range 4-20 μK.