Darmstadt 2008 – scientific programme

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SYWS: Fundamentale Wechselwirkungen und ihre Symmetrien

SYWS 2: Fundamental Interactions and their Symmetries II

SYWS 2.1: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 12, 2008, 16:00–16:30, 1A/B/C

Cold and ultracold molecules - a path for fundamental studies — •Gerhard Rempe — Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, D-85748 Garching, Germany

Remarkable progress has been made in the ability to produce samples of cold and ultracold neutral molecules, homonuclear and heteronuclear, with and without permanent dipole moment, thus opening up new possibilities for precision experiments and fundamental studies. In our laboratory, we have been able to extract the slowest molecules of dipolar gases such as formaldehyde or water with near-unity efficiency from a thermal reservoir, guide the molecules over long distances and trap them, all with electric fields. We have associated ultracold rubidium molecules from ultracold atoms by means of ultranarrow Feshbach resonances, and have produced highly correlated arrays of such molecules in optical lattices. The talk reviews some of these experiments, including the realization of a universal cold molecules source operated at liquid Helium temperature, the measurement of the rotational distribution of the guided molecules, and the investigation of fundamental quantum phenomena which occur when ultracold molecules are restricted to move in zero or one spatial dimension.