Stuttgart 2012 – scientific programme
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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik
MO 13: Poster 1: Cold Molecules, Femtosecond Spectroscopy, Molecular Dynamics
MO 13.3: Poster
Tuesday, March 13, 2012, 16:30–19:00, Poster.IV
Reaching for the Ultracold with Polyatomic Molecules — •Barbara G.U. Englert, Rosa Glöckner, Alexander Prehn, Martin Zeppenfeld, and Gerhard Rempe — Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, 85748 Garching, Germany
Realizing a general method for cooling polar molecules to ultracold temperatures has been a key area of research over the past decade. The precise control over the molecular degrees of freedom possible at ultracold temperatures combined with the strong dipole-dipole interaction makes ultracold molecules attractive candidates for applications reaching from many-body physics to quantum information science. A highly versatile technique to cool a large variety of polyatomic molecules to the microkelvin regime is opto-electrical cooling [1]. In this general Sisyphus-type cooling scheme the strong interaction of polar molecules with electric fields is exploited to repeatedly remove a large amount of kinetic energy in a single step.
Here we present the first experimental realization of opto-electrical cooling using trapped CH3F. Trapping is achieved with a microstructured electric trap [1,2] providing a record-long lifetime of over 10 s. Vibrational and rotational molecular states are driven using infrared and microwave fields, with homogeneous electric fields in the trap allowing selective addressing of rotational M-sublevels. We achieve a reduction of the molecular temperature from 358 mK to 77 mK, and an increase of the phase-space density by a factor of 7.
[1] M. Zeppenfeld et al., Phys. Rev. A 80, 041401(R) (2009).
[2] B.G.U. Englert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett, in press (arXiv:1107.2821).