Many-particle effects in laser cooling of one-dimensional optical molasses

We analyze the influence of long-range dipole-dipole interactions between atoms with Zeeman substructure on atomic polarization-gradient cooling at low laser power. The system we consider is a cloud of N atoms driven by two counterpropagating linear cross-polarized laser beams (lin⊥lin configuration) on a – transition. In the semiclassical regime we derive analytical results for the change of the cooling force due to collisions and for the diffusion coefficient in the far-field approximation. For the energy regime where the center-of-mass motion is characterized by oscillations in the optical potentials, we estimate the effect of these far-field collisions on the motion-induced sideband structure of the resonance fluorescence spectrum by using a white-noise approximation for the background light field. This gives a qualitative signature of the heating mechanism in such systems.