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Cosmic-ray and X-ray ionisations in molecular gas produce a weak far-ultraviolet flux through the radiative decay of H2 molecules that have been excited by collisions with energetic electrons (the Prasad-Tarafdar mechanism). I consider the…
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…
High-precision hydrogen spectroscopy is an active field which helps to determine the Rydberg constant and proton charge radius, tests bound-state QED, and can search for Beyond Standard Model (BSM) Physics. Additionally, with recent…
Chemical reactions can be surprisingly efficient at ultracold temperatures ( < 1mK) due to the wave nature of atoms and molecules. The study of reactions in the ultracold regime is a new research frontier enabled by cooling and trapping…
We investigate a setup where a cloud of atoms is trapped in an optical lattice potential of a standing wave laser field which is created by retro-reflection on a micro-membrane. The membrane vibrations itself realize a quantum mechanical…
The semiclassical dynamics of atoms are theoretically studied, when the atoms are confined inside a standing-wave high-finesse resonator. The atoms are cooled by scattering processes in which the photons of a transverse laser are coherently…
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…
We use state- and time-resolved coherent Raman spectroscopy to study the rotational dynamics of oxygen molecules in ultra-high rotational states. While it is possible to reach rotational quantum numbers up to $N \approx 50$ by increasing…
Ultrafast electronic dynamics are typically studied using pulsed lasers. We demonstrate a complementary experimental approach: quantum simulation of ultrafast dynamics using trapped ultracold atoms. Counter-intuitively, this technique…
Hydroxyl (OH) is expected to be abundant in diffuse interstellar molecular gas as it forms along with $H_2$ under similar conditions and within a similar extinction range. We have analyzed absorption measurements of OH at 1665 MHz and 1667…
Optical spectroscopy of molecular radicals is an important tool in physical chemistry, and is a prerequisite for many experiments which use molecules for quantum science and precision measurement. However, even the simplest molecules have…
A simple method to control molecular translation with a chemical reaction is demonstrated. Slow NO molecules have been produced by partially canceling the molecular beam velocity of NO$_2$ with the recoil velocity of the NO photofragment.…
We present a simple quantum mechanical model describing excited rotational states of molecules in superfluid helium nanodroplets, as recently studied in non-adiabatic molecular alignment experiments [Cherepanov et al., Phys. Rev. A 104,…
An increasingly large variety of molecular species are being cooled down to low energies in recent years, and innovative ideas and powerful techniques continue to emerge to gain ever more precise control of molecular motion. In this brief…
We show, through modeling and simulation, that it is feasible to construct a storage ring that will store dense bunches of strong-field-seeking polar molecules at 30 m/s (kinetic energy of 2K) and hold them, for several minutes, against…
We report laser cooling and trapping of yttrium monoxide (YO) molecules in an optical lattice. We show that gray molasses cooling remains exceptionally efficient for YO molecules inside the lattice with a molecule temperature as low as…
Strong optical forces with minimal spontaneous emission are desired for molecular deceleration and atom interferometry applications. We report experimental benchmarking of such a stimulated optical force driven by ultrafast laser pulses. We…
We report the creation and characterization of a near quantum-degenerate gas of polar $^{40}$K-$^{87}$Rb molecules in their absolute rovibrational ground state. Starting from weakly bound heteronuclear KRb Feshbach molecules, we implement…
Studies of quantum thermal effects on molecular excitation dynamics have often relied on oversimplified models, such as energy eigenstates or low-dimensional potentials, which fail to capture the complexity of real chemical systems. In…
Molecular hydrogen is a fascinating candidate for quantum fluid showing bosonic and fermionic superfluidity. We have studied diffusion dynamics of thin films of H$_2$, HD and D$_2$ adsorbed on a glass substrate by measurements of…