Comparing cavity and ordinary laser cooling within the Lamb–Dicke regime

Abstract

Cavity-mediated cooling has the potential to become one of the most efficient techniques to cool molecular species down to very low temperatures. In this paper we analyse cavity cooling with single-laser driving for relatively large cavity decay rates κ and relatively large phonon frequencies ν. It is shown that cavity cooling and ordinary laser cooling are essentially the same within the validity range of the Lamb–Dicke approximation. This is done by deriving a closed set of rate equations and calculating the corresponding stationary state phonon number and cooling rate. For example, when ν is either much larger or much smaller than κ, the minimum stationary state phonon number scales as κ2/16ν2 (strong confinement regime) and as κ/4ν (weak confinement regime), respectively.