Abstract
The Sisyphus effect places the atom in a situation where it climbs more potential hills than it descends. It is at work in most cooling experiments and leads very simply to velocity distributions limited only by the recoil associated with a single photon. The key point is that, for an atom with several fundamental sublevels, long time constants may appear, linked to the optical pumping time between sublevels. These long time constants can be associated with low energies. We first presented the Sisyphus effect in its initial version, before moving on to recent developments that generalize this type of cooling to other atomic transitions. In particular, we looked at grey molasses, which extends the concept of Sisyphus cooling to atomic species not previously concerned.
