Paper (e-Print)

A collection of simulations related to different laser cooling methods.

Usage

Run make in the top-level directory. The generated executables are stored in the bin/ directory.

Simulations

• optical_molasses (source code in src/optmol/) contains semiclassical Monte Carlo simulations for the standard "optical molasses" laser cooling.
• swapint and swapmotion (source code in src/swapcool/) contains density matrix simulations for Sawtooth-Wave Adiabatic Passage (SWAP) cooling, described by Bartolotta et. al., Physical Review A 98, 023404 (2018). swapint is a simulation of just internal states, while swapmotion accounts for both internal and momentum states.

Notes on some other directories

• config/ holds default configuration files for the simulations.
• doc/ holds explanations of the physics of the simulated cooling methods, as well as code documentation.
• scripts/plotting/ contains simple Python scripts for quick and dirty plotting.
• vendor/pcg-cpp-0.98/ contains the PCG RNG, which provides faster random number generation than the C++ library.

Acknowledgements

Research is done under Professor Francis Robicheaux for the 2019 Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at Purdue University.