Related papers: Photon spin molasses for laser cooling molecular r…
From the study of long-range-interacting systems to the simulation of gauge fields, open-shell Lanthanide atoms with their large magnetic moment and narrow optical transitions open novel directions in the field of ultracold quantum gases.…
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…
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…
The semiclassical theory of laser cooling is applied for the analysis of cooling of unbound atoms with the values of the ground and exited state angular moments 1/2 in a one-dimensional nondissipative optical lattice. We show that in the…
We demonstrate rotational excitation of molecular ions that are sympathetically cooled by laser-cooled atomic ions to a temperature as low as ca. 10 mK. The molecular hydrogen ions HD+ and the fundamental rotational transition $(v=0,\,…
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…
Light-induced rotation of absorbing microscopic particles by transfer of angular momentum from light to the material raises the possibility of optically driven micromachines. The phenomenon has been observed using elliptically polarized…
In this paper, we develop an analytical approach to Doppler cooling of atoms by one- or two-photon transitions when the natural width of the excited level is so small that the process leads to a Doppler temperature comparable to the recoil…
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…
Recently a number of diatomic and polyatomics molecules has been identified as a prospective systems for Doppler/Sisyphus cooling. Doppler/Sisyphus cooling allows to decrease the kinetic energy of molecules down to microkelvin temperatures…
We demonstrate rotational and vibrational cooling of cesium dimers by optical pumping techniques. We use two laser sources exciting all the populated rovibrational states, except a target state that thus behaves like a dark state where…
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…
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…
A recent progress on laser cooling of molecules is summarized. Since the development during 1980s for atomic species, laser cooling has been the very beginning step to cool and trap atoms for frontier research on quantum simulations,…
We present new techniques in cooling 39K atoms using laser light close to the D1 transition. First, a new compressed-MOT configuration is taking advantage of gray molasses type cooling induced by blue-detuned D1 light. It yields an…
The initialization of nuclear spin to its ground state is challenging due to its small energy scale compared with thermal energy, even at cryogenic temperature. In this Letter, we propose an opto-nuclear quadrupolar effect, whereby…
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…
In this work we investigate the theory for three different uni-directional population transfer schemes in trapped multilevel systems which can be utilized to cool molecular ions. The approach we use exploits the laser-induced coupling…
We consider deflection of polarizable molecules by inhomogeneous optical fields, and analyze the role of molecular orientation and rotation in the scattering process. It is shown that molecular rotation induces spectacular rainbow-like…
We propose and demonstrate a novel laser cooling mechanism applicable to particles with narrow-linewidth optical transitions. By sweeping the frequency of counter-propagating laser beams in a sawtooth manner, we cause adiabatic transfer…