State selection in a cesium beam by laser-diode optical pumping

Optical pumping of a lithium atomic beam for atom interferometry

“…We will not discuss here optical pumping of cold atom clouds because these experiments usually differ from the optical pumping of a thermal beam and also because there are too many experiments to be quoted here. Here are a short list of papers describing the optical pumping of alkali atomic beams: lithium [11,12], sodium [5,[13][14][15][16][17][18], rubidium [19,20] and cesium [4,[21][22][23][24][25][26]. Optical pumping is used for different goals (orientation of the electronic spin, concentration of the largest possible fraction of the atoms in a single F level or in a single F, m F sublevel) and different applications (atomic clocks, collision studies, parity violation experiments, etc).…”

Combined quantum-state preparation and laser cooling of a continuous beam of cold atoms

“…A first laser is used to excite the F = 4 ground state in order to pump the atoms into F = 3 while a second π-polarized laser excites the F = 3 → F = 3 transition. As a consequence, |F = 3, m = 0 is the only ground state sub-level which is not excited by laser light and therefore all atoms will accumulate into that state [7][8][9][10][11]. Therefore, the effect of the second laser is to produce Zeeman pumping toward m = 0.…”

“…In order to understand what is the limiting factor in our experiment, we developed a numerical model of optical pumping based on the rate equations presented in Ref. [8] with the notable difference that we took into account off-resonance excitation of all transitions.…”

“…* Electronic address: gianni.didomenico@unine.ch Later, this selection process was advantageously replaced by laser optical pumping to transfer all the atoms from one hyperfine ground state to the other [2][3][4][5][6]. Then in the 1980s, two-laser optical pumping was proposed to produce both hyperfine and Zeeman pumping toward one of the clock state Zeeman sub-levels [7][8][9]. However no improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio was observed because of the increased noise introduced by the pumping process [10,11].…”

Relógio atômico a feixe efusivo de 133Cs: estudo da estabilidade e da acuracia como função do deslocamento da frequência atômica devido ao efeito zeeman de segunda ordem, ao cavity pulling e ao rabi pulling

“…Uma vez excitados, os átomos decaem por emissão espontânea para um nível do estado fundamental. Após vários ciclos de absorção e emissão, os átomos são levados a inverter a sua população [27]. Nós usamos a transição π − polarizada, (F = 4 ↔ F 0 = 4) da linha D 2 do Cs para o bombeamento óptico, e a transição (F = 4 ↔ F 0 = 5) para a detecção, como mostra a figura 2.2 .…”