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April 12, 2005

Class review — 4/12

Hey Class,

Don't forget that there is a pre-flight for Thursday. Don't do it at the last minute!

Today we talked about:
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  1. Some issues brought up in the last class.

    • The spectrum of scattered light is equal to the driving light

    • The spectrum of spontaneous emission (what comes out of an atom if we start in an an excited state) is a Lorentzian with a width set by Gamma.

    • The fact that I dislike my old picture for why saturation occurs. I think it's just an effect related to damping in a two-level system.

    • A puzzle (based on the micromaser) related to quantum measurement.

  2. Laser cooling. We saw how Doppler cooling works by creating velocity-dependent, or friction-like, force.

  3. We also calculated the cooling rate for Doppler cooling, and we could see how it cannot work well for atoms with large initial velocities (something above a few-10 m/sec).

  4. We talked about recoil heating, which occurs for any atom that is scattering light. The so-called "recoil limit" is around a few micro-Kelvin.

More next time!

Brian

Posted by Brian at April 12, 2005 07:08 PM

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