Related papers: A Study of molecular cooling via Sisyphus processe…

We present a rigorous theoretical study of low-temperature collisions of polyatomic molecular radicals with ^1S_0 atoms in the presence of an external magnetic field. Accurate quantum scattering calculations based on ab initio and scaled…

We report on the design, installation, and test of an experimental facility for the production of ultra-cold atomic isotopes and isomers of cesium. The setup covers a broad span of mass numbers and nuclear isomers, allowing one to directly…

We analyze the dynamics of atom-laser interactions for atoms having multiple, closely spaced, excited-state hyperfine manifolds. The system is treated fully quantum mechanically, including the atom's center-of-mass degree of freedom, and…

The development of the magneto-optical trap revolutionized the fields of atomic and quantum physics by providing a simple method for the rapid production of ultracold, trapped atoms. A similar technique for producing a diverse set of dense,…

Thermophoresis moves molecules along temperature gradients, typically from hot to cold. We superpose fluid flow with thermophoretic molecule flow under well defined microfluidic conditions, imaged by fluorescence microscopy. DNA is trapped…

The atom-by-atom characterization of quantum gases requires the development of novel measurement techniques. One particularly promising new technique demonstrated in recent experiments uses strong fluorescent laser scattering from neutral…

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…

Sympathetic cooling of trapped ions has become an indispensable tool for quantum information processing and precision spectroscopy. In the simplest situation a single Doppler-cooled ion sympathetically cools another ion which typically has…

We propose and analyze a scheme for sympathetic cooling of the translational motion of polar molecules in an optical lattice, interacting one by one with laser-cooled ions in a radio-frequency trap. The energy gap between the excitation…

Recent work with laser-cooled molecules in attractive optical traps has shown that the differential AC Stark shifts arising from the trap light itself can become problematic, limiting collisional shielding efficiencies, rotational coherence…

Laser cooling typically requires one or more repump lasers to clear dark states and enable recycling transitions. Here, we have achieved cooling of Be+ ions using a single laser beam, facilitated by one-dimensional heating through…

Aluminium monofluoride (AlF) is a promising candidate for laser cooling and trapping at high densities. We show efficient production of AlF in a bright, pulsed cryogenic buffer gas beam, and demonstrate rapid optical cycling on the Q…

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 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…

In the last years, it was demonstrated that neutral molecules can be loaded on a microchip directly from a supersonic beam. The molecules are confined in microscopic traps that can be moved smoothly over the surface of the chip. Once the…

Light forces can be harnessed to levitate mesoscopic objects and cool them down towards their motional quantum ground state. Significant roadblocks on the way to scale up levitation from a single to multiple particles in close proximity are…

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…

We demonstrate and characterize Zeeman-Sisyphus (ZS) deceleration of a beam of ytterbium monohydroxide (YbOH). Our method uses a combination of large magnetic fields ($\sim$ 2.5 T) and optical spin-flip transitions to decelerate molecules…

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…

We have studied a general technique for laser cooling a cloud of polarized trapped atoms down to the Doppler temperature. A one-dimensional optical molasses using polarized light cools the axial motional degree of freedom of the atoms in…