1 - General introduction

Summary

In the 1980s the first successful experiments [312] and theory [98], demonstrating that light could be used to cool and confine atoms to submillikelvin temperatures, opened several exciting new chapters in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics. Atom interferometry [6, 8], matter–wave holography [294], optical lattices [192], and Bose–Einstein condensation in dilute gases [18, 95] all exemplified significant new physics where collisions between atoms cooled with light play a pivotal role. The nature of these collisions has become the subject of intensive study not only because of their importance to these new areas of AMO physics but also because their investigation has led to new insights into how cold collision spectroscopy can lead to precision measurements of atomic and molecular parameters and how radiation fields can manipulate the outcome of a collision itself. As a general orientation Fig. 1.1 shows how a typical atomic de Broglie wavelength varies with temperature and where various physical phenomena situate along the scale. With de Broglie wavelengths on the order of a few thousandths of a nanometer, conventional gas-phase chemistry can usually be interpreted as the interaction of classical nuclear point particles moving along potential surfaces defined by their associated electronic charge distribution. At one time liquid helium was thought to define a regime of cryogenic physics, but it is clear from Fig. 1.1 that optical and evaporative cooling have created “cryogenic” environments below liquid helium by many orders of magnitude.