Laser cooling of atoms towards quantum degeneracy or BEC

Summary form only given. High-brightness sources of cold atoms prepared by laser cooling have many applications in precision experiments and Bose-Einstein condensation. While in optical molasses the temperature increases strongly with atomic density, tight confinement of atoms in the Lamb-Dicke regime in an optical lattice allows to extend laser cooling to higher atomic densities, and subsequent adiabatic release from the lattice can be used to convert the high local density into low kinetic energy at constant bulk density. For an initial temperature in the lattice that is smaller than the vibrational spacing, free-space temperatures near or below the recoil limit can be reached.