Collective sideband cooling in an optical ring cavity -: art. no. 051401

We propose a cavity-based laser-cooling and trapping scheme, providing tight confinement and cooling to very low temperatures, without degradation at high particle densities. A bidirectionally pumped ring cavity builds up a resonantly enhanced optical standing wave that acts to confine polarizable particles in deep potential wells. The particle localization yields a coupling of the degenerate traveling wave modes via coherent photon redistribution. This induces a splitting of the cavity resonances with a high-frequency component, which is tuned to the anti-Stokes Raman sideband of the particles oscillating in the potential wells, yielding cooling due to excess anti-Stokes scattering.