Related papers: Rovibrational cooling of molecules by optical pump…

We have recently demonstrated that optical pumping methods combined with photoassociation of ultra-cold atoms can produce ultra-cold and dense samples of molecules in their absolute rovibronic ground state. More generally, both the external…

The methods producing cold molecules from cold atoms tend to leave molecular ensembles with substantial residual internal energy. For instance, Cs2 molecules initially formed via photoassociation of cold Cs atoms are in several vibrational…

Some of us have recently reported in Science 321 232 (2008) vibrational cooling of translationally cold Cs_2 molecules into the lowest vibrational level v=0 of the singlet X 1Sigma_g ground electronic state. Starting from a sample of cold…

Cooling the rotation and the vibration of molecules by broadband light sources was possible for trapped molecular ions or ultracold molecules. Because of a low power spectral density, the cooling timescale has never fell below than a few…

We present an opto-electrical cooling scheme for polar molecules based on a Sisyphus-type cooling cycle in suitably tailored electric trapping fields. Dissipation is provided by spontaneous vibrational decay in a closed level scheme found…

We investigate theoretically the application of tailored incoherent far-infrared fields in combination with laser excitation of a single rovibrational transition for rotational cooling of translationally cold polar diatomic molecules. The…

We use two-laser optical pumping on a continuous atomic fountain in order to prepare cold cesium atoms in the same quantum ground state. A first laser excites the F=4 ground state to pump the atoms toward F=3 while a second pi-polarized…

We consider the use of pulse-shaped broadband femtosecond lasers to optically cool rotational and vibrational degrees of freedom of molecules. Since this approach relies on cooling rotational and vibrational quanta by exciting an electronic…

We present detailed calculations at the basis of our recent proposal for simultaneous cooling the rotational, vibrational and external molecular degrees of freedom. In this method, the molecular rovibronic states are coupled by an intense…

We propose a method of stimulated laser cooling of diatomic molecules by counter-propagating $\pi$-trains of ultrashort laser pulses. The cooling cycles occur on the rovibrational transitions inside the same ground electronic manifold, thus…

We present a new method for the generation of rotationally and vibrationally state-selected, translationally cold molecular ions in ion traps. Our technique is based on the state-selective threshold photoionization of neutral molecules…

Laser cycling of resonances can remove entropy from a system via spontaneously emitted photons, with electronic resonances providing the fastest cooling timescales because of their rapid relaxation rates. Although atoms are routinely laser…

Laser cooling of molecules employing broadband optical pumping involves a timescale separation between laser excitation and spontaneous emission. Here, we optimize the optical pumping step using shaped laser pulses. We derive two…

The translational motion of molecular ions can be effectively cooled sympathetically to temperatures below 100 mK in ion traps through Coulomb interactions with laser-cooled atomic ions. The distribution of internal rovibrational states,…

The general idea that optical radiation may cool matter was put forward by Pringsheim already in 1929. Doppler cooling of dilute atomic gases is an extremely successful application of this concept, and more recently anti-Stokes cooling in…

We trap neutral Cs atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice and cool them close to the zero-point of motion by resolved-sideband Raman cooling. Sideband cooling occurs via transitions between the vibrational manifolds associated with a…

We suggest a protocol for the sympathetic cooling of a molecular asymmetric top rotor co-trapped with laser-cooled atomic ions, based on resonant coupling between the molecular ion's electric dipole moment and a common normal mode of the…

We report on cooling of an atomic cesium gas closely above an evanescent-wave atom mirror. At high densitities, optical cooling based on inelastic reflections is found to be limited by a density-dependent excess temperature and trap loss…

A near-minimal instance of optical cooling is experimentally presented wherein the internal-state entropy of a single atom is reduced more than twofold by illuminating it with broadband, incoherent light. Since the rate of optical pumping…

Ultracold molecular gases are promising as an avenue to rich many-body physics, quantum chemistry, quantum information, and precision measurements. This richness, which flows from the complex internal structure of molecules, makes the…