Related papers: Deceleration and trapping of heavy diatomic molecu…
A Stark decelerator is an effective tool for controlling motional degrees of freedom of polar molecules. Due to technical limitations, many of the current Stark decelerators focus on molecules in low-field-seeking quantum states and are…
We explore a technique for decelerating molecules using a static magnetic field and optical pumping. Molecules travel through a spatially varying magnetic field and are repeatedly pumped into a weak-field seeking state as they move towards…
Laser cooling and trapping are central to modern atomic physics. The workhorse technique in cold-atom physics is the magneto-optical trap (MOT), which combines laser cooling with a restoring force from radiation pressure. For a variety of…
We demonstrate simultaneous deceleration and trapping of a cold atomic and molecular mixture. This is the first step towards studies of cold atom-molecule collisions at low temperatures as well as application of sympathetic cooling. Both…
Rapid progress in cooling and trapping of molecules has enabled first experiments on high resolution spectroscopy of trapped diatomic molecules, promising unprecedented precision. Extending this work to polyatomic molecules provides unique…
Beams of polar molecules can be focused using an array of electrostatic lenses in alternating gradient (AG) configuration. They can also be accelerated or decelerated by applying an appropriate high voltage switching sequence to the lenses.…
Rydberg alkaline earth atoms are promising tools for quantum simulation and metrology. When one of the two valence electrons is promoted to long-lived circular states, the second valence electron can be optically manipulated without…
The helium dimer in its metastable triplet state is a promising candidate to be the first laser-cooled homonuclear molecule. An ultracold gas of He$_2^*$ would enable a new generation of precision measurements to test quantum…
Developing the isolation and control of ultracold atomic systems to the level of single quanta has led to significant advances in quantum sensing, yet demonstrating a quantum advantage in real world applications by harnessing entanglement…
Simultaneous two-dimensional trapping of neutral dipolar molecules in low- and high-field seeking states is analyzed. A trapping potential of the order of 20 mK can be produced for molecules like ND3 with time-dependent electric fields. The…
Recently, laser cooling methods have been extended from atoms to molecules. The complex rotational and vibrational energy level structure of molecules makes laser cooling difficult, but these difficulties have been overcome and molecules…
Recent experiments have demonstrated direct cooling and trapping of diatomic and triatomic molecules in magneto-optical traps (MOTs). However, even the best molecular MOTs to date still have density $10^{-5}$ times smaller than in typical…
We report on the Stark deceleration of a pulsed molecular beam of NO radicals. Stark deceleration of this chemically important species has long been considered unfeasible due to its small electric dipole moment of 0.16 D. We prepared the NO…
We examine the prospects for utilizing the optical bichromatic force (BCF) to greatly enhance laser deceleration and cooling for near-cycling transitions in small molecules. We discuss the expected behavior of the BCF in near-cycling…
Recent theoretical investigations have indicated that rapid optical cycling should be feasible in complex polyatomic molecules with diverse constituents, geometries and symmetries. However, as a composite molecular mass grows, so does the…
In this paper, we analyze electric deflection fields for polar molecules in terms of a multipole expansion and derive a simple but rather insightful expression for the force on the molecules. Ideally, a deflection field exerts a strong,…
It has been roughly three decades since laser cooling techniques produced ultracold atoms, leading to rapid advances in a vast array of fields. Unfortunately laser cooling has not yet been extended to molecules because of their complex…
We study the dynamics of a supersonic molecular beam in a low-finesse optical cavity and demonstrate that most molecules in the beam can be decelerated to zero central velocity by the intracavity optical field in a process analogous to…
We demonstrate a scheme for magneto-optically trapping strontium monofluoride (SrF) molecules at temperatures one order of magnitude lower and phase space densities three orders of magnitude higher than obtained previously with laser-cooled…
We review the use of laser cooling and trapping for Standard Model tests, focusing on trapping of radioactive isotopes. Experiments with neutral atoms trapped with modern laser cooling techniques are testing several basic predictions of…