Eur. Phys. J. D 22, 333-339 (2003)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2003-00038-4

Anisotropic velocity distributions in 3D dissipative optical lattices

¹ Department of Physics, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
² Laboratoire Kastler-Brossel, Département de Physique de l'École Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
³ Department of Physics, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden

Corresponding author: ^a jersblad@physto.se

Received: 3 September 2002
Revised: 25 October 2002
Published online: 11 February 2003

Abstract

We present a direct measurement of velocity distributions in two dimensions by using an absorption imaging technique in a 3D near resonant optical lattice. The results show a clear difference in the velocity distributions for the different directions. The experimental results are compared with a numerical 3D semi-classical Monte-Carlo simulation. The numerical simulations are in good qualitative agreement with the experimental results.