Related papers: Optical pulse-shaping for internal cooling of mole…
We present a theoretical analysis of a novel scheme for optical cooling of particles that does not in principle require a closed optical transition. A tightly confined laser beam interacting with a trapped particle experiences a phase…
We present a comprehensive study of enantioselective orientation of chiral molecules excited by a pair of delayed cross-polarized femtosecond laser pulses. We show that by optimizing the pulses' parameters, a significant (~ 10%) degree of…
We consider the formation of cold ground-state polar molecules in a low vibrational level by laser fields. Starting from a pair of cold colliding atoms of dissimilar species, we propose a strategy consisting of three steps. In the first…
An optical centrifuge is a laser pulse which enables controlled rotational excitation of molecules. Centrifuged molecules rotating with well-defined angular frequencies are ideal candidates to probe many-body quantum systems at the…
Chemical reactions can be surprisingly efficient at ultracold temperatures ( < 1mK) due to the wave nature of atoms and molecules. The study of reactions in the ultracold regime is a new research frontier enabled by cooling and trapping…
Doppler cooling is a widely used technique to laser cool atoms and nanoparticles exploiting the Doppler shift involved in translational transformations. The rotational Doppler effect arising from rotational coordinate transformations should…
The simple structure of the BH molecule makes it an excellent candidate for direct laser cooling. We measure the branching ratios for the decay of the ${\rm A}^{1}\Pi (v'=0)$ state to vibrational levels of the ground state, ${\rm…
Detecting the internal state of polar molecules is a substantial challenge when standard techniques such as resonance-enhanced multi photon ionization (REMPI) or laser-induced fluorescense (LIF) do not work. As this is the case for most…
We propose a new laser cooling method for atomic species whose level structure makes traditional laser cooling difficult. For instance, laser cooling of hydrogen requires single-frequency vacuum-ultraviolet light, while multielectron atoms…
Molecules with deep vibrational potential wells provide optical intervals sensitive to variation in the proton-electron mass ratio ($\mu$). On one hand, polar molecules are of interest since optical state preparation techniques have been…
We introduce a method for cooling atoms in an optical dipole trap using pulse-width modulation (PWM) technique, without reducing the laser power of the dipole trap. The PWM technique involves digital modulation of the trap at a fixed…
Sympathetic cooling with ultracold atoms and atomic ions enables ultralow temperatures in systems where direct laser or evaporative cooling is not possible. It has so far been limited to the cooling of other microscopic particles, with…
We consider deflection of rotating symmetric molecules by inhomogeneous optical and static electric fields, compare results with the case of linear molecules, and find new singularities in the distribution of the scattering angle.…
Optomechanical cooling of levitated dielectric particles represents a promising new approach in the quest to cool small mechanical resonators towards their quantum ground state. We investigate two-mode cooling of levitated nanospheres in a…
We provide a theory of the deflection of polar and non-polar rotating molecules by inhomogeneous static electric field. Rainbow-like features in the angular distribution of the scattered molecules are analyzed in detail. Furthermore, we…
We report on coherent control of excitation processes of translationally ultracold rubidium dimers in a magneto-optical trap by using shaped femtosecond laser pulses. Evolution strategies are applied in a feedback loop in order to optimize…
Sideband cooling is a popular method for cooling atoms to the ground state of an optical trap. Applying the same method to molecules requires a number of challenges to be overcome. Strong tensor Stark shifts in molecules cause the optical…
We propose a scheme for laser cooling of negatively charged molecules. We briefly summarise the requirements for such laser cooling and we identify a number of potential candidates. A detailed computation study with C$\_2^-$, the most…
Ultracold LiCs molecules in the absolute ground state X$^1\Sigma^+$, v"=0, J"=0 are formed via a single photo-association step starting from laser-cooled atoms. The selective production of v"=0, J"=2 molecules with a 50-fold higher rate is…
Quantum mechanical phenomena, such as electronic coherence and entanglement, play a key role in achieving the unrivalled efficiencies of light-energy conversion in natural photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes, and triggered the growing…