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 …

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses optical dipole traps for neutral atoms. Methods
for storage and trapping of charged and neutral particles have very often served as the …

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 …

An evaporative cooling strategy that uses a two-component Fermi gas was employed to cool
a magnetically trapped gas of 7× 105 40K atoms to 0.5 of the Fermi temperature T F. In this …

The realization of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEe) in dilute atomic gases [1-5] achieved
several long-standing goals. First, neutral atoms were cooled into the lowest energy state …

The photon—the quantum excitation of the electromagnetic field—is massless but carries
momentum. A photon can therefore exert a force on an object upon collision. Slowing the …

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the concept of evaporative cooling of trapped
neutral atoms. The recent observations of Bose–Einstein condensation have shown …

Reviews the history of optical trapping and manipulation of small-neutral particles, from the
time of its origin in 1970 up to the present. As we shall see, the unique characteristics of this …

The authors review progress in understanding the nature of atomic collisions occurring at
temperatures ranging from the millidegrees Kelvin to the nanodegrees Kelvin regime. The …