Laser-driven Sisyphus cooling in an optical dipole trap

Abstract: We propose a novel Sisyphus cooling scheme for atoms confined in a far off resonance optical dipole trap. Utilizing the differential trap-induced AC Stark shift, two electronic levels of the atom are resonantly coupled by a cooling laser preferentially near the trap bottom. After absorption of a cooling photon, the atom loses energy by climbing the steeper potential, and then spontaneously decays preferentially away from the trap bottom. The proposed method is particularly suited to cooling alkaline-earth-like atoms where two-level systems with narrow electronic transitions are present. Numerical simulations for the cases of $^{88}$Sr and $^{174}$Yb demonstrate the expected recoil and Doppler temperature limits. The method requires a relatively small number of scattered photons and can potentially lead to phase space densities approaching quantum degeneracy in sub-second timescales.