An ultracold high-density sample of rovibronic ground-state molecules in an optical lattice

By J. Danzl, M. Mark, E. Haller, M. Gustavsson, R. Hart, J. Aldegunde, J. Hutson, Hanns-Christoph Naegerl Institut fuer Experimentalphysik und Zentr Quantenphysik, Universitaet Innsbruck, D. Chemistry and 1 more. 2009

243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Control over all internal and external degrees of freedom of molecules at the level of single quantum states will enable a series of fundamental studies in physics and chemistry(1,2). In particular, samples of ground-state molecules at ultralow temperatures and high number densities will facilitate new quantum-gas studies(3) and future applications in quantum information science(4). However, high phase-space densities for molecular samples are not readily attainable because efficient cooling techniques such as laser cooling are lacking. Here we produce an ultracold and dense sample of molecules in a single hyperfine level of the rovibronic ground state with each molecule individually trapped in the motional ground state of an optical lattice well. Starting from a zero-temperature atomic Mott-insulator state(5) with optimized double-site occupancy(6), weakly bound dimer molecules are efficiently associated on a Feshbach resonance(7) and subsequently transferred to the rovibronic ground state by a stimulated four-photon process with >50% efficiency. The molecules are trapped in the lattice and have a lifetime of 8 s. Our results present a crucial step towards Bose-Einstein condensation of ground-state molecules and, when suitably generalized to polar heteronuclear molecules, the realization of dipolar quantum-gas phases in optical lattices(8-10).

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42680fd65e3799abf12275f889c726ee2d64615b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Spectroscopy

Citations in the corpus

New frontiers for quantum gases of polar molecules (2016, methodology): “This approach has been extremely successful in creating ultracold, dense samples of ground-state molecules, including fermionic KRb [36], bosonic Cs2 [37], bosonic RbCs [38, 39], fermionic NaK [40], and bosonic NaRb [41].”
Roadmap on STIRAP applications (2019, background): “STIRAP on ultracold molecules was first tested with homonuclear molecules such as Rb2 [2] and Cs2 [3] about 12 years ago.”
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in physics, chemistry, and beyond (2016, methodology): “This approach has been experimentally demonstrated by Danzl et al. (2010).”