Abstract
Magnetically induced laser cooling to temperatures close to the recoil limit is investigated in one dimension. For a metastable neon beam, we present high-precision measurements investigating the actual temperature limit in this cooling process. Using time-of-flight techniques to reduce the effect of the longitudinal velocity spread, we observe cooling at small magnetic field toward ν = 0 with an r.m.s. width of the distribution of 5.4 cm/s, well below the Doppler limit. At a larger magnetic field (0.4 Gauss) the velocity-selective resonances are extremely sharp. Here we find the r.m.s. width of the distribution to be 3.4 cm/s, only 1.1 times the recoil speed ℏk/M, corresponding to a temperature T = 2.7 μK.
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