Vibrational ground state cooling of a neutral atom in a tightly focused optical dipole trap

It was recently shown int the works of Tey et. al (2008), that a single atom can efficiently scatter photons out of a focused coherent light beam. The scattering probability is strongly dependent on a thermal motion of the atom and can be maximized if the atom is well localized at a focus. To achieve that, the authors implement a Raman sideband cooling technique that is commonly used in ion traps.