In 1978, while I was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, I read a paper by Art Ashkin (1978) in
which he described how one might slow down an atomic beam of sodium using the radiation …

The techniques of optical trapping and manipulation of neutral particles by lasers provide
unique means to control the dynamics of small particles. These new experimental methods …

I Introduction.-1 Review of Quantum Mechanics.-1.1 Time-Dependent Perturbation Theory.-
1.2 The Rabi Two-Level Problem.-1.2. 1 Light Shifts.-1.2. 2 The Dressed Atom Picture.-1.2. 3 …

We report the viscous confinement and cooling of neutral sodium atoms in three dimensions
via the radiation pressure of counterpropagating laser beams. These atoms have a density …

We report the first observation of optically trapped atoms. Sodium atoms cooled below 10− 3
K in" optical molasses" are captured by a dipole-force optical trap created by a single …

The written version of my lecture is a personal account of the development of laser cooling
and trapping. Rather than give a balanced history of the field, I chose to present a personal …

Electromagnetic interactions play a central role in low energy physics. They are responsible
for the cohesion of atoms and molecules and they are at the origin of the emission and …

Bose-Einstein condensation, or BEC, has a long and rich history dating from the early
1920s. In this article we will trace briefly over this history and some of the developments in …

The last few years have seen rapid progress in the application of laser cooling to molecules.
In this review, we examine what kinds of molecules can be laser cooled, how to design a …

Velocity sensitive stimulated Raman transitions have been used to measure the gravitational
acceleration, g, of laser cooled sodium atoms in an atomic fountain geometry. By using an …