Phys.org July 13, 2022
Cooling some atomic gases confers unique and sometimes useful properties to the atoms. The use of magneto optical traps (MOTs) for cooling works on only a small number of atomic groups on the periodic table. Rather than a ground state transition, researchers in Singapore used a transition from a more long-lived metastable state in their MOT. This required modifying it to work with just indium atoms. Once the reconfiguration was completed, the researchers created a cloud made up of more than 500 million indium-115 atoms in their MOT and cooled the atoms to approximately 1 mK for 12.3 seconds, which is about the same amount of time that MOTs have been used to chill other atoms. They have not yet used their customized MOT to carry out experiments on the chilled clouds. According to the researchers their technique could be used to open new avenues of research on atoms in other parts of the periodic table…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Optimization of the MOT atom number… Credit: Phys. Rev. A 105, L061101, 7 June 2022Â