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Penning collisions of laser-cooled metastable helium atoms

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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 β on the excited state ( 23 P 2) and metastable state ( 23 S 1) populations is also investigated. From these results we infer a rather uniform rate constant K sp = (1±0.4)×10-7 cm3/s.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Département de Physique de l'École Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France, , , , , , FR

    F. Pereira Dos Santos, J. Léonard, A. Sinatra, Junmin Wang & M. Leduc

  2. Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers, Université Paris-Nord, avenue J.B. Clément, 93430 Villetaneuse, France, , , , , , FR

    F. Perales

  3. Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Perugia, Via Pascoli, Perugia, Italy, , , , , , IT

    F. Saverio Pavone

  4. Universität Hannover, Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover, Germany, , , , , , DE

    E. Rasel

  5. TIFR, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai 400005, India, , , , , , IN

    C.S. Unnikrishnan

Authors
  1. F. Pereira Dos Santos
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  2. F. Perales
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  3. J. Léonard
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  4. A. Sinatra
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  5. Junmin Wang
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  6. F. Saverio Pavone
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  7. E. Rasel
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  8. C.S. Unnikrishnan
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  9. M. Leduc
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Additional information

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

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Pereira Dos Santos, F., Perales, F., Léonard, J. et al. Penning collisions of laser-cooled metastable helium atoms. Eur. Phys. J. D 14, 15–22 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/s100530170228

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s100530170228

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