Levy Statistics and Laser Cooling : How Rare Events Bring Atoms to Rest

This is a book about laser cooling, a new research field with many potential applications. The authors present an original approach, using the tools and concepts of statistical physics. A new understanding of laser cooling, both intuitive and quantitative, is obtained. The volume also comprises a case study allowing non-Gaussian (Lévy) statistics, a technique being used more frequently in many different fields.

François Bardou obtained his Ph.D. in 1995 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris for his experimental and theoretical studies of laser cooling below the one photon recoil, and was the 1995 winner of the Aimé Cotton prize (Atomic Physics prize of the French Physical Society). He now works at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) where he works on stochastic problems in quantum tunnelling.

Jean-Philippe Bouchard is a Senior Expert at the Service de Physique de l'Etat Condense and at CEA-Saclay. In 1994 he founded his own company called Science and Finance, and continues to have diverse research interests which include statistical physics, granular matter and theoretical finance. He is in charge of various statistical physics and finance courses in the Grandes Ecoles, Paris, and is the co-author of Theory of Financial Risk (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Alain Aspect is a Director of Research at CNRS and a Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau. After completing a series of experiments in the early 1980s on the foundations of quantum mechanics, he joined Claude Cohen-Tannoudji at the Ecole Normale Supérieure to work on laser cooling of atoms. He is now head of the Atom Optics group of Institut d'Optique at Orsay and is the co-author of Introduction to Quantum Optics (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji is Professor of Atomic and Molecular Physics at the Collège de France in Paris and was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work on the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. He is also the co-author of three other books: Quantum Mechanics (1992), Photons and Atoms: Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics (1989), and Atom-Photon Interactions: Basic Processes and Applications (1998).