Optical cooling of interacting atoms in a tightly confined trap

Abstract

In a recent paper, we have proposed a novel laser cooling scheme for reducing collisional energy of a pair of atoms by using photoassociative transitions. In that paper, we considered two atoms in free space, that is we have not considered the effects of trap on the cooling process. Here in this paper, we qualitatively discuss the possibility of extending this idea for Raman sideband cooling of a pair of interacting atoms trapped in Lamb-Dicke (LD) regime. Apart from cooling, our method may be important for manipulating on-site interaction of atoms in an optical lattice.