Population Dynamics in Coherent Excitation of Cold Atoms

A summary of the entire scope of the Kansas State University AMO program is contained in the J. R. Macdonald Laboratory abstract. The present document is limited to a discussion of recent progress in the MOTRIMS projects. MOTRIMS, or magneto optical trap recoil ion momentum spectroscopy, is a methodology originally developed for the study of ion-atom or photon-atom collisions. Following the basic “inverse kinematics” idea underlying COLTRIMS (cold target recoil ion momentum spectroscopy) MOTRIMS combines well-established techniques for cooling and trapping atoms with the equally well-established techniques for measuring the momenta of product ions in the above-mentioned collision types. Several years ago it was realized that the whole idea of MOTRIMS could be turned around and charge transfer is now being used as a probe of population dynamics in cold, trapped atomic samples. The key idea behind MOTRIMS is that in an ionizing collision, the recoiling target ion’s momentum carries with it detailed information about the collision process. For example, in the single electron transfer process of this work, the Q-value, or energy defect of a collision is given by