Laser Cooling at Resonance

Abstract

We show experimentally that 3-D laser cooling of lithium atoms is achieved when the laser light is tuned exactly to resonance with the atomic transition. For a theoretical description of this surprising phenomenon we resolve to a full model which takes into account both the entire atomic structure and the laser light polarization. Here we build such a model for $^7$Li atoms cooled on the $D_{2}$-line in a $\sigma^+-\sigma^-$ laser configuration. We take all 24 Zeeman sub-levels into account and obtain good agreement with the experimental data. Moreover, by means of Monte-Carlo simulations we show that coherent processes play an important role in showing consistency between the theory and the experimental results.