1210.1310 (Diogo Rio Fernandes et al.)

Sub-Doppler laser cooling of fermionic 40K atoms in three-dimensional
gray optical molasses    [PDF]

Diogo Rio Fernandes, Franz Sievers, Norman Kretzschmar, Saijun Wu, C. Salomon, Frédéric Chevy

We demonstrate sub-Doppler cooling of 40K on the D_1 atomic transition. Using a gray molasses scheme, we efficiently cool a compressed cloud of 6.5x10^8 atoms from ~ 4\mK to 20uK in 8 ms. After transfer in a quadrupole magnetic trap, we measure a phase space density of ~10^-5. This technique offers a promising route for fast evaporation of fermionic 40K.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1310