A High Phase-Space-Density Gas of Polar Molecules

By Kang-kuen Ni, S. Ospelkaus, M. Miranda, A. Pe’er, B. Neyenhuis, J. Zirbel, S. Kotochigova, P. Julienne, D. Jin, J. Ye. Science, 2008

1,331 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A quantum gas of ultracold polar molecules, with long-range and anisotropic interactions, not only would enable explorations of a large class of many-body physics phenomena but also could be used for quantum information processing. We report on the creation of an ultracold dense gas of potassium-rubidium (40K87Rb) polar molecules. Using a single step of STIRAP (stimulated Raman adiabatic passage) with two-frequency laser irradiation, we coherently transfer extremely weakly bound KRb molecules to the rovibrational ground state of either the triplet or the singlet electronic ground molecular potential. The polar molecular gas has a peak density of 1012 per cubic centimeter and an expansion-determined translational temperature of 350 nanokelvin. The polar molecules have a permanent electric dipole moment, which we measure with Stark spectroscopy to be 0.052(2) Debye (1 Debye = 3.336 × 10–30 coulomb-meters) for the triplet rovibrational ground state and 0.566(17) Debye for the singlet rovibrational ground state.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eeaaae528c34304267bcad6a4d2a40976232665c

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Citations in the corpus

Feshbach resonances in ultracold gases (2014, background): “12–14 A Fano resonance 15 is essentially equivalent to a Feshbach resonance, but the term Fano resonance is usually associated to the asymmetric line-shape of the cross section (in contrast to the symmetric Breit-Wigner resonance) as function of the energy.”
Controlling the quantum stereodynamics of ultracold bimolecular reactions (2010, background): “We then create molecules in the lattice by first forming extremely weakly bound molecules through magneto-association of atom pairs and then coherently transferring these molecules into their ro-vibrational ground state using optical transitions [21].”
Cold and ultracold molecules: science, technology and applications (2009, methodology): “[74, 332, 377] is particularly significant: it represents the formation of a strongly dipolar molecule that should be stable even in the presence of collisions (see below).”
Observation of dipolar spin-exchange interactions with lattice-confined polar molecules (2013, background): “Analogous to how a spin-echo pulse works, this pulse sequence swaps the eigenstates of the dipolar interaction Hamiltonian (equation (1)) for two isolated particles to allow for subsequent rephasing.”
Rapidly rotating atomic gases (2008, methodology): “d to ǫdd ≃ 1 by using a Feshbach resonance to reduce as[60]. Very recently, there has been the exciting achievement of the condensation of hetero-nuclear molecules in their ground ro-vibrational state[61]. Such systems can have large electric dipole moments, leading to very strong electric dipole in”
Rotational laser cooling of vibrationally and translationally cold molecular ions (2010, background): “electric dipole moments, formation of molecules through Feshbach resonances followed by transfer to the vibrational ground state of electronic molecular potentials by stimulated Raman adiabatic passage scheme”
Two-orbital SU(N) magnetism with ultracold alkaline-earth atoms (2009, background): “[1-50] References for the main text are listed at the end of the main text above.”
Feshbach resonances in ultracold gases (2008, methodology): “Only shortly afterwards, the same group (Ni et al., 2008) demonstrated polar molecules in both the triplet and the singlet rovibrational ground state, where the binding energies correspond to 7.2 THz and 125 THz, respectively.”