Rotational cooling of trapped polyatomic molecules
Abstract
Controlling the internal degrees of freedom is a key challenge for applications of cold and ultracold molecules. Here, we demonstrate rotational-state cooling of trapped methyl fluoride molecules (CH3F) by optically pumping the population of 16 M-sublevels in the rotational states J=3,4,5, and 6 into a single level. By combining rotational-state cooling with motional cooling, we increase the relative number of molecules in the state J=4, K=3, M=4 from a few percent to over 70%, thereby generating a translationally cold (~30mK) and nearly pure state ensemble of about 10^6 molecules. Our scheme is extendable to larger sets of initial states, other final states and a variety of molecule species, thus paving the way for internal-state control of ever larger molecules.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1511.07360,
title = {Rotational cooling of trapped polyatomic molecules},
author = {Rosa Glöckner and Alexander Prehn and Barbara G. U. Englert and Gerhard Rempe and Martin Zeppenfeld},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.07360},
year = {2017}
}