PG cooling is typically performed using a 3D optical setup with three pairs of perpendicular laser beams with an atomic ensemble in the center. Each beam is prepared with an orthogonal polarization to its counterpropagating beam. The laser frequency detuned from a selected transition between the ground and excited states of the atom. Since the cooling processes rely on multiple transitions between care must be taken such that the atomic does not fall out of these two states. This is done by using a second, "repumping", laser to pump any atoms that fall out back into the ground state of the transition. For example: in cesium cooling experiments, the cooling laser is typically chosen to be detuned from the  to  transition and a repumping laser tuned to the  to  transition is also used to prevent the Cs atoms from being pumped into the  state.
The atoms must be cooled before the PG cooling, this can be done using the same setup via Doppler cooling. If the atoms are precooled with Doppler cooling, the laser intensity must be lowered and the detuning increased for PG cooling to be achieved.
The atomic temperature can be measured using the time of flight (ToF) technique. In this technique, the laser beams are suddenly turned off and the atomic ensemble is allowed to expand. After a set time delay t, a probe beam is turned on to image the ensemble and obtain the spatial extent of the ensemble at time t. By imaging the ensemble at several time delays, the rate of expansion is found. By measuring the rate of expansion of the ensemble the velocity distribution is measured and from this, the temperature is inferred.
An important theoretical result is that in the regime where PG cooling functions, the temperature only depends on the ratio of  to  and that the cooling approaches the recoil limit. These predictions were confirmed experimentally in 1990 when W.D. Phillips et al. observed such scaling in their cesium atoms as well as a temperature of 2.5K, 12 times the recoil temperature of 0.198K for the D2 line of cesium used in the experiment.