English

Magneto-Optical Trap for Polar Molecules

Atomic Physics 2008-12-13 v2 Chemical Physics Optics

Abstract

We propose a method for laser cooling and trapping a substantial class of polar molecules, and in particular titanium (II) oxide (TiO). This method uses pulsed electric fields to nonadiabatically remix the ground-state magnetic sublevels of the molecule, allowing us to build a magneto-optical trap (MOT) based on a quasi-cycling J=J"1J'=J"-1 transition. Monte-Carlo simulations of this electrostatically remixed MOT (ER-MOT) demonstrate the feasibility of cooling TiO to a temperature of 10 μK\mathrm{\mu}K and trapping it with a radiation-pumping-limited lifetime on the order of 80 ms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0808.2171,
  title  = {Magneto-Optical Trap for Polar Molecules},
  author = {Benjamin K. Stuhl and Brian C. Sawyer and Dajun Wang and Jun Ye},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0808.2171},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures, 1 table v2: updated to final published text and figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:10:50.331Z