Laser cooling and trapping as an enabling technology

Summary form only given. Techniques for cooling and trapping atoms now provide unique capabilities for the manipulation of atoms. In particular, they make possible very low temperatures, extraordinarily high atomic phase space densities, and long perturbation-free observation times. These capabilities enable one to carry out many new measurements on atoms with great precision and/or in entirely new regimes of temperature and density. This tutorial will concentrate primarily on the practical aspects of how to apply current laser cooling and trapping techniques. This will include descriptions of the various techniques and their capabilities, as well as a discussion of tradeoffs between price, complexity, and various performance parameters. Finally, I will briefly discuss how these techniques are applied in a number of specific cases including cold collisions, precision measurements including atomic clocks, atom interferometry, collecting radioactive isotopes, and the creation of Bose-Einstein condensates.