Cooling, Stopping, and Trapping Atoms

Abstract

While it has long been possible to trap charged particles, until now no one has conclusively demonstrated the use of non-material walls to confine neutral atoms [1,2]. All of the traps that have been proposed suffer from the same difficulty: they require atoms with extremely low kinetic energy in order to work [3]. Practical atom traps are necessarily very shallow because the electromagnetic forces which can be applied to neutral atoms are generally quite small, since they arise from dipole or higher order moments. The successful trapping described here occurs because we have developed the means (via laser manipulation of an atomic beam) of producing atoms cold enough (typically less than 1 K) to be contained in a trap. We have demonstrated magnetic trapping and we believe our technique can load any type of neutral atom trap, including the various laser traps proposed [3].