SUBRECOIL LASER COOLING AND LEVY FLIGHTS

Anomalous diffusion processes, dominated by rare events, are shown to exist and to play a central role in certain subrecoil laser cooling schemes. We present a new statistical analysis of these processes, in terms of Levy flights, which provides a precise analytical description of the cooled atoms in the long time limit, where the standard methods of quantum optics are inappropriate. These analytical predictions are quantitatively checked by comparison with the results of quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the cooling process at intermediate times.