Related papers: Laser-coolable polyatomic molecules with heavy nuc…
We propose a novel Sisyphus cooling scheme for atoms confined in a far off resonance optical dipole trap. Utilizing the differential trap-induced AC Stark shift, two electronic levels of the atom are resonantly coupled by a cooling laser…
Calcium monofluoride (CaF) molecules are loaded into an optical dipole trap (ODT) and subsequently laser cooled within the trap. Starting with magneto-optical trapping, we sub-Doppler cool CaF and then load $150(30)$ CaF molecules into an…
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…
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 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…
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…
For experiments that require a quantum system to be in the ultra-cold regime, laser cooling is an essential tool. While techniques for laser cooling ions and neutral atoms have been refined and temperatures below the Doppler limit have been…
Optical Bloch equations and rate equations serve as powerful tools to model light-matter interactions from textbook-like two-level atoms to the complex internal dynamics of molecules. A particular challenge in this context is posed by…
Direct laser cooling of molecules has made significant progress in recent years. However, the selective cooling and manipulation of molecules based on their isotopic composition, which is ubiquitous in atomic laser cooling, has not yet been…
We demonstrate the possibility of three-dimensional cooling of neutral atoms by illuminating them with two counterpropagating laser beams of mutually orthogonal linear polarization, where one of the lasers is a speckle field, i.e. a highly…
We report a magneto-optical trap of strontium monohydroxide (SrOH) containing 2000(600) molecules at a temperature of 1.2(3) mK. The lifetime is 91(9) ms, which is limited by decay to optically unaddressed vibrational states. This provides…
Gray molasses is a powerful tool for sub-Doppler laser cooling of atoms to low temperatures. For alkaline atoms, this technique is commonly implemented with cooling lasers which are blue-detuned from either the D1 or D2 line. Here we show…
We report direct laser cooling of a symmetric top molecule, reducing the transverse temperature of a beam of calcium monomethoxide (CaOCH$_3$) to $1.8\pm0.7$ mK while addressing two distinct nuclear spin isomers. These results open a path…
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,…
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…
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…
We report observation of sub-Doppler cooling of lithium using an irregular-tetrahedral laser beam arrangement, which is produced by a nanofabricated diffraction grating. We are able to capture 11(2) % of the lithium atoms from a grating…
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…
We investigate sub-Doppler laser cooling of bosonic potassium isotopes, whose small hyperfine splitting has so far prevented cooling below the Doppler temperature. We find instead that the combination of a dark optical molasses scheme that…
We propose a laser cooling technique in which atoms are selectively excited to a dressed metastable state whose light shift and decay rate are spatially correlated for Sisyphus cooling. The case of cooling magnetically trapped…