Issue Eur. Phys. J. D Volume 14, Number 1, April 2001 Page(s) 15 - 22 Section Atomic Physics DOI 10.1007/s100530170228

Eur. Phys. J. D 14, 15-22

Penning collisions of laser-cooled metastable helium atoms

F. Pereira Dos Santos¹, F. Perales², J. Léonard¹, A. Sinatra¹, Junmin Wang¹, F. Saverio Pavone^{3, 4}, E. Rasel⁵, C.S. Unnikrishnan⁶ and M. Leduc<sup>1

1</sup>  Laboratoire Kastler Brossel (Unité de Recherche de l'École Normale Supérieure et de l'Université Pierre et Marie Curie, associée au CNRS (UMR 8552).) , Département de Physique de l'École Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
²  Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers (UMR 7538 du CNRS) , Université Paris-Nord, avenue J.B. Clément, 93430 Villetaneuse, France
³  Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Perugia, Via Pascoli, Perugia, Italy
⁴  Lens and INFM, L.go E. Fermi 2, Firenze, Italy
⁵  Universit t Hannover, Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover, Germany
⁶  TIFR, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai 400005, India

franck.pereira-dos-santos@lkb.ens.fr

(Received 8 September 2000 and Received in final form 19 December 2000 )

Abstract
We present experimental results on the two-body loss rates in a magneto-optical trap of metastable helium atoms. Absolute rates are measured in a systematic way for several laser detunings ranging from -5 to -30 MHz and at different intensities, by monitoring the decay of the trap fluorescence. The dependence of the two-body loss rate coefficient on the excited state ( ) and metastable state ( ) populations is also investigated. From these results we infer a rather uniform rate constant cm³/s.

PACS
32.80.Pj - Optical cooling of atoms; trapping.
34.50.Rk - Laser-modified scattering and reactions.


© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag 2001

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