CAMARA , Abdoulaye

First, I present our feedback experiment leading to the spontaneous formation of patterns in the cross section of a laser beam passing through a cloud of cold 87Rb atoms and retroreflected by a mirror. In these experiments we were able to identify three mechanisms of nonlinearity: the spin nonlinearity associated with the Zeeman degrees of...

In this thesis, I report the results of studies performed during these last three years at Institut Non Linéaire de Nice.First, I present our feedback experiment leading to the spontaneous formation of patterns in the cross section of a laser beam passing through a cloud of cold 87 Rb atoms and retro-reflected by a mirror. In these experiments...

We investigate the scaling behavior of a very large magneto-optical trap (VLMOT) containing up to $1.4 \times 10^{11}$ Rb$^{87}$ atoms. By varying the diameter of the trapping beams, we are able to change the number of trapped atoms by more than 5 orders of magnitude. We then study the scaling laws of the loading and size of the VLMOT, and...