Introduction to the Series

Welcome to the SPIE Field Guides—a series of publications written directly for the practicing engineer or scientist. Many textbooks and professional reference books cover optical principles and techniques in depth. The aim of the SPIE Field Guides is to distill this information, providing readers with a handy desk or briefcase reference that provides basic, essential information about optical principles, techniques, or phenomena, including definitions and descriptions, key equations, illustrations, application examples, design considerations, and additional resources. A significant effort will be made to provide a consistent notation and style between volumes in the series.

Each SPIE Field Guide addresses a major field of optical science and technology. The concept of these Field Guides is a format-intensive presentation based on figures and equations supplemented by concise explanations. In most cases, this modular approach places a single topic on a page, and provides full coverage of that topic on that page. Highlights, insights, and rules of thumb are displayed in sidebars to the main text. The appendices at the end of each Field Guide provide additional information such as related material outside the main scope of the volume, key mathematical relationships, and alternative methods. While complete in their coverage, the concise presentation may not be appropriate for those new to the field.

The SPIE Field Guides are intended to be living documents. The modular page-based presentation format allows them to be updated and expanded. We are interested in your suggestions for new Field Guide topics as well as what material should be added to an individual volume to make these Field Guides more useful to you. Please contact us at fieldguides@SPIE.org.

John E. Greivenkamp, Series Editor

College of Optical Sciences

The University of Arizona

Related Field Guides

Table of Contents

Preface

Cooling or refrigeration is based on heat removal and dates back thousands of years to when people tried to preserve their food using ice and snow. The laser—a groundbreaking scientific achievement of the 20^th century— has revolutionized the cooling process. The advent of lasers brought laser cooling, also known as optical refrigeration, into existence. Today, laser cooling and its applications represent one of the major subfields of atomic, molecular, and solid state physics.

This Field Guide provides an overview of the basic principles of laser cooling of atoms, ions, nanoparticles, and solids, including Doppler cooling, polarization gradient cooling, different sub-recoil schemes of laser cooling, forced evaporation, laser cooling with anti-Stokes fluorescence, hybrid laser cooling, and Raman and Brillouin cooling. It also covers radiation-balanced lasers and Raman lasers with heat mitigation, and considers the basic principles of optical dipole traps, magnetic traps, and magneto-optical traps. This Field Guide will serve both to introduce students, scientists, and engineers to this exciting field, and to provide a quick reference guide for the essential math and science.

I would like to thank SPIE Press Manager Timothy Lamkins and Series Editor John Greivenkamp for the opportunity to write a Field Guide for one of the most interesting areas of photonics, as well as SPIE Press Sr. Editor Dara Burrows for her help.

This book is dedicated to my mom, Albina.

Galina Nemova

September 2019