Kinetic theory of cavity cooling and self-organisation of a cold gas

Understand

We study spatial self-organisation and dynamical phase-space compression of a dilute cold gas of laser-illuminated polarisable particles in an optical resonator.

• Deriving a non-linear Fokker--Planck equation for the particles' phase-space density allows us to treat arbitrarily large ensembles in the far-detuning limit and explicitly calculate friction forces, momentum diffusion and steady-state temperatures.
• In addition, we calculate the self-organisation threshold in a self-consistent analytic form.
• For a homogeneous ensemble below threshold the cooling rate for fixed laser power is largely independent of the particle number.