 Counterpropagating saturation resonance

Take a single isolated optical transition of angular frequency ${\omega }_0$. Both beams have laboratory angular frequency ${\omega }_L$, with laser detuning $\delta ={\omega }_L-{\omega }_0$. Let the pump travel along $+z$, the probe along $-z$, $v$ denote an atom's $z$-velocity, and $k={\omega }_0/c$ be the approximate vacuum wavenumber; $c$ is the speed of light. To first order in $v/c$, the laser detunings in the atom's frame areThe pump addresses atoms near $v=\delta /k$, while the probe addresses atoms near $v=-\delta /k$. For the same transition, simultaneous exact resonance requires both expressions to vanish: adding and subtracting gives $\delta =0$ and $v=0$. The selected atoms can still have substantial transverse velocity. Finite natural linewidth admits a narrow interval of longitudinal velocities; a warm gas has not been cooled.

This is velocity selection, not cancellation of each atom's Doppler shift within a single absorption event. Changing laser detuning selects different atoms for ordinary photon absorption, but only near line centre do these two selected classes overlap. Laser cooling instead changes the distribution of the atoms' velocities through repeated momentum transfer.