Cesium gas strongly confined in one dimension: sideband cooling and collisional properties

We study one-dimensional (1D) sideband cooling of cesium atoms strongly confined in a far-detuned optical lattice. The Lamb-Dicke regime is achieved in the lattice direction whereas the transverse confinement is much weaker. The employed sideband cooling method, first studied by Vuletic et al., uses Raman transitions between Zeeman levels and produces a spin-polarized sample. We present a detailed study of this cooling method and investigate the role of elastic collisions in the system. We accumulate 83(5)% of the atoms in the vibrational ground state of the strongly confined motion, and elastic collisions cool the transverse motion to a temperature of 2.8 µK = 0.7 hw_osc/k_B, where wosc is the oscillation frequency in the strongly confined direction. The sample then approaches the regime of a quasi-2D cold gas. We analyze the limits of this cooling method and propose a dynamical change of the trapping potential as a mean of cooling the atomic sample to still lower temperatures. Measurements of the rate of thermalization between the weakly and strongly confined degrees of freedom are compatible with the zero-energy scattering resonance observed previously in weak 3D traps. For the explored temperature range the measurements agree with recent calculations of quasi-2D collisions. Transparent analytical models reproduce the expected behavior for k_BT>hw_osc and also for k_BT<hw_osc where the 2D features are prominent