Related papers: Laser-Cooled Polyatomic Molecules for Improved Ele…
Analogous to the extension of laser cooling techniques from two-level to three-level atoms, Doppler cooling of molecules with an intermediate electronic state is considered. In particular, we use a rate-equation approach to simulate cooling…
We present our progress towards a new measurement of the electron electric dipole moment using a beam of YbF molecules. Data are currently being taken with a sensitivity of 10^{-27} e.cm / \sqrt{day}.
Precision measurements in molecules have advanced rapidly in recent years through developments in techniques to cool, trap, and control. The complexity of molecules makes them a challenge to study, but also offers opportunities for enhanced…
Over the past decade, tremendous progress has been made to extend the tools of laser cooling and trapping to molecules. Those same tools have recently been applied to polyatomic molecules (molecules containing three or more atoms). In this…
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…
A new possibility of laser cooling of alkaline-earth-metal and Ytterbium atoms using a two-photon transition is analyzed. We consider a $^{1}S_{0}$ - $^{1}S_{0}$ transition, with excitation in near resonance with the $^{1}P_{1}$ level. This…
Laser cooling is a powerful method to control molecules for applications in precision measurement, as well as quantum information, many-body physics, and fundamental chemistry. However, many optically-active metal centers in valence states…
The YbOH triatomic molecule can be efficiently used to measure the electron electric dipole moment, which violates time-reversal (T) and spatial parity (P) symmetries of fundamental interactions [I. Kozyryev, N.R. Hutzler, Phys. Rev. Lett.…
Ultracold YbAg molecules have been recently proposed as promising candidates for electron electric dipole moment searches [Verma, Jayich, and Vutha, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 153201 (2020)]. Here, we calculate potential energy curves, permanent…
Laser cooling is a key ingredient for quantum control of atomic systems in a variety of settings. In divalent atoms, two-stage Doppler cooling is typically used to bring atoms to the uK regime. Here, we implement a pulsed radial cooling…
In a combined experimental and theoretical effort, we demonstrate a novel type of dipolar system made of ultracold bosonic dipolar molecules with large magnetic dipole moments. Our dipolar molecules are formed in weakly bound Feshbach…
We present a method to design a finite decay rate for excited rotational states in polar molecules. The setup is based on a hybrid system of polar molecules with atoms driven into a Rydberg state. The atoms and molecules are coupled via the…
We propose an experiment to measure the electric dipole moment of the electron using ultracold YbF molecules. The molecules are produced as a thermal beam by a cryogenic buffer gas source, and brought to rest in an optical molasses that…
YbF has been identified as a molecule that can be used to investigate charge-parity symmetry violations that are beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Cooling to sub-milli-Kelvin is advantageous for experiments that probe…
We propose to sympathetically slow and cool polar molecules in a cold, low-density beam using laser-cooled Rydberg atoms. The elastic collision cross sections between molecules and Rydberg atoms are large enough to efficiently thermalize…
The electric dipole moment of the electron (eEDM) can be measured with high precision using heavy polar molecules. In this paper, we report on a series of new techniques that have improved the statistical sensitivity of the YbF eEDM…
We demonstrate continuous Sisyphus cooling combined with a continuous loading mechanism used to efficiently slow down and accumulate atoms from a guided beam. While the loading itself is based on a single slowing step, applying a radio…
Many predictions of Doppler cooling theory of two-level atoms have never been verified in a three-dimensional geometry, including the celebrated minimum achievable temperature $\hbar \Gamma/2 k_B$, where $\Gamma$ is the transition…
We report on the realization of a stable mixture of ultracold lithium and ytterbium atoms confined in a far-off-resonance optical dipole trap. We observe sympathetic cooling of 6Li by 174Yb and extract the s-wave scattering length magnitude…
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…