L茅vy Statistics and Laser Cooling by Fran莽ois Bardou, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Alain Aspect and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Cambridge University Press, 拢19.95, ISBN 0521004225
HOW can you cool a cloud of atoms to within a whisper of absolute zero? Blasting it with laser beams would certainly seem an unlikely option, yet this is precisely how physicists have managed the trick, leading to experiments in Bose-Einstein condensation and the creation of matter waves, and the excruciating details of atomic physics and quantum optics. So it is fortunate that French physicists Fran莽ois Bardou, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Alain Aspect and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji have now written L茅vy Statistics and Laser Cooling, a beautifully concise yet complete introduction to the logic of this incredible technique.
They point out that modern laser-cooling techniques exploit the strange to produce the extreme鈥攔elying on rare events in which atoms, driven by interaction with laser light, suddenly come almost to rest. The temperature of a gas of atoms reflects how fast the atoms are moving. Hence, a sequence of these rare halting events, each uncontrollable in itself, gradually nudges the cloud towards the edge of absolute zero.
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Readers will need to be comfortable with a little mathematics, but students of physics and other scientists interested in laser cooling will find this book hard to beat for insight and conceptual clarity.