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VOLUME 61 (1995) | ISSUE 1 | PAGE 23
Cooling atoms in dark gravitational laser traps
Alkali atoms repeatedly reflected by an evanescent light wave and kept in their lower hyperfine ground state by a weak repumping laser beam can be cooled to recoil-limited temperatures by a Sisyphus and a geometric cooling mechanism, which are connected with spontaneous transitions to the upper hyperfine ground state during the reflections. These effects can be used in gravitational laser traps to produce extremely cold and dense samples of atoms.