Conclusions and Outlook

Abstract

Cold atom experiments have progressed significantly over the $25$ years since the first cold atoms were observed in optical molasses. Increasingly, research is focussing more and more towards the use of cold atoms in applications such as sensing, metrology and information processing. This trend has made it ever more important to find means of cooling more general species of atoms and molecules; current methods are simply too species-selective. Throughout the course of this thesis I have shown how the retarded dipole–dipole interaction can be used to achieve this aim; by investing the dipole force with a non-conservative nature, one can transfer energy from a moving polarisable particle to or from the light field—the nature of the particle itself is largely irrelevant. Several key theoretical results were reported in this thesis; these are summarised below: