Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier - Bat. 3R4 - 118 route de Narbonne - 31062 Toulouse Cedex 09 - France


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Maxwell’s demon in the generation of an intense and slow guided beam

We analyze quantitatively the generation of a continuous beam of atoms by the periodic injection of individual packets in a guide, followed by their overlapping. We show that slowing the packets using a moving mirror before their overlapping enables an optimal gain on the phase space density of the generated beam. This is interpreted as a Maxwell’s demon type strategy as the experimentalist exploits the information on the position and velocity of the center of mass of each packet.

View online : Phys. Rev. A, 78, 015401 (2008)