Nonadiabatic cooling and optimal control in off-resonance dipole optical potentials

We investigate coherent control of atomic translational motion in an applied off-resonance dipole optical potential. Since spontaneous emission can be neglected in this regime, the problem is treated as one of coherent momentum transfer. We consider both adiabatic and nonadiabatic regimes of cooling in the framework of the Wigner function formalism. For the adiabatic case, an approximate solution is obtained corresponding to the cooling envelope for an arbitrary time dependence of the external field. The nonadiabatic cooling process is formulated in terms of optimal control theory in order to define the most favorable regime of cooling under imposed constraints on the intensity of the control field. We find that the applied control field yields a significant reduction of the effective temperature of the atoms.