Squeezing Atomic Vibrations In An Optical Lattice. A New Mechanism Of Optical Cooling

Abstract

We propose a new method to obtain a squeezed matter field of atomic vibrations by use of an optical lattice, and the laser pulse technique of Garrett et al used for acoustic phonons [1]. We show that it is possible to reduce the variance of atomic momentum to a value as low as the recoil momentum. Consequently, cooling to recoil energy can be achieved.