Sub-Doppler cavity cooling beyond the Lamb-Dicke regime

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of cavity cooling of a single ion beyond the Lamb-Dicke regime and demonstrate a cooling limit of approximately 50% of the Doppler temperature using a high finesse cavity. We also study the statistical properties of the ion-cavity emission and present a model that maps the phonon states to the photon states. With this model, we explain the super-Poissonian photon distribution observed in our experiments and propose a method to estimate the ion temperature in a real-time manner based on the statistical behavior of the photon emission from the cavity. © 2013 American Physical Society.