Molecules cooled below the Doppler limit
Abstract
The ability to cool atoms below the Doppler limit -- the minimum temperature reachable by Doppler cooling -- has been essential to most experiments with quantum degenerate gases, optical lattices and atomic fountains, among many other applications. A broad set of new applications await ultracold molecules, and the extension of laser cooling to molecules has begun. A molecular magneto-optical trap has been demonstrated, where molecules approached the Doppler limit. However, the sub-Doppler temperatures required for most applications have not yet been reached. Here we cool molecules to 50 uK, well below the Doppler limit, using a three-dimensional optical molasses. These ultracold molecules could be loaded into optical tweezers to trap arbitrary arrays for quantum simulation, launched into a molecular fountain for testing fundamental physics, and used to study ultracold collisions and ultracold chemistry.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1703.00580,
title = {Molecules cooled below the Doppler limit},
author = {S. Truppe and H. J. Williams and M. Hambach and L. Caldwell and N. J. Fitch and E. A. Hinds and B. E. Sauer and M. R. Tarbutt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.00580},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
8 pages, 6 figures