Molecules cooled below the Doppler limit

By S. Truppe, H. Williams, M. Hambach, L. Caldwell, N. Fitch, E. Hinds, B. Sauer, M. Tarbutt. Nature Physics, 2017

338 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Magneto-optical trapping and sub-Doppler cooling of atoms has been instrumental for research in ultracold atomic physics. This regime has now been reached for a molecular species, CaF. Magneto-optical trapping and sub-Doppler cooling have been essential to most experiments with quantum degenerate gases, optical lattices, atomic fountains and many other applications. A broad set of new applications await ultracold molecules1, and the extension of laser cooling to molecules has begun2,3,4,5,6. A magneto-optical trap (MOT) has been demonstrated for a single molecular species, SrF7,8,9, but the sub-Doppler temperatures required for many applications have not yet been reached. Here we demonstrate a MOT of a second species, CaF, and we show how to cool these molecules to 50 μK, well below the Doppler limit, using a three-dimensional optical molasses. These ultracold molecules could be loaded into optical tweezers to trap arbitrary arrays10 for quantum simulation11, launched into a molecular fountain12,13 for testing fundamental physics14,15,16,17,18, and used to study collisions and chemistry19 between atoms and molecules at ultracold temperatures.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94a20eea15a6db00f8fc7fd7fbb86cc9059b68c2

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Quantum control of molecular rotation (2018, background): “Laser cooling was recently extended to calcium and ytterbium monofluoride (Anderegg et al., 2017, 2018; Truppe et al., 2017; Lim et al., 2018), species which are candidates for quantum simulation and measuring the electron’s dipole moment.”
Robust Encoding of a Qubit in a Molecule (2019, background): “[35] S.”
Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules (2017, background): “Recent advances in cooling and control of molecules (Hutzler, Lu, and Doyle, 2012; Germann, Tong, and Willitsch, 2014; Kobayashi, Ogino, and Inouye, 2015; Cheng et al., 2016; Norrgard et al., 2016; Prehn et al., 2016; Wolf et al., 2016; Kozyryev et al., 2017; Park et al., 2017; Truppe et al., 2017; ”
Laser cooling of optically trapped molecules (2018, positive): “The inverted angular momentum structure of CaF is similar to the D 1 line in alkali atoms, and allows for further cooling at blue detunings 20,26–28 .”