Eur. Phys. J. D 46, 507-515 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2007-00329-8

Three dimensional cooling and trapping with a narrow line

¹ Laboratoire Aimé Cotton, CNRS, UPR 3321, Université Paris-Sud, Bât. 505, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France
² State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and Atomic and Molecular Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430071, P.R. China
³ Institut Non Linéaire de Nice, CNRS, UMR 6618, Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, 06560 Valbonne, France

Corresponding author: ^a david.wilkowski@inln.cnrs.fr

Received: 3 August 2007
Revised: 13 October 2007
Published online: 7 December 2007

Abstract

The intercombination line of strontium at 689 nm is successfully used in laser cooling to reach the photon recoil limit with Doppler cooling in a magneto-optical traps (MOT). In this paper, we present a systematic study of the loading efficiency of such a MOT. Comparing the experimental results to a simple model allows us to discuss the actual limitation of our apparatus. We also study in detail the final MOT regime emphasizing the role of gravity on the position, size and temperature along the vertical and horizontal directions. At large laser detuning, one finds an unusual situation where cooling and trapping occur in the presence of a high bias magnetic field.