Cooling many particles at once

Full text: We propose a mechanism for the collective cooling of a large number N of trapped particles to very low temperatures by applying red-detuned laser fields and coupling them to the quantized field inside an optical resonator. The dynamics is described by what appear to be rate equations but where some of the major quantities are coherences and not populations. It is shown that the cooperative behaviour of the system provides cooling rates of the same order of magnitude as the cavity decay rate. This constitutes a significant speed-up compared to other cooling mechanisms since this rate can, in principle, be as large as the square root of N times the single-particle cavity or laser coupling constants. (author)