Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe

MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 19: Cold Molecules II

MO 19.1: Gruppenbericht

Donnerstag, 15. März 2012, 14:00–14:30, V38.03

Sisyphus Cooling of Polyatomic Molecules — •Martin Zeppenfeld, Barbara G.U. Englert, Rosa Glöckner, Manuel Mielenz, Christian Sommer, Laurens van Buuren, Michael Motsch, and Gerhard Rempe — Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, 85748 Garching, Germany

Interest in ultracold polar molecules has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, with potential applications reaching beyond those of ultracold atoms due to additional internal degrees of freedom and long-range dipole-dipole interactions. Developing methods to prepare the required ensembles of ultracold molecules has been a formidable challenge. To this end, we have now achieved first results with opto-electrical cooling [1], a general Sisyphus-type cooling scheme for polar molecules. Molecules are cooled by more than a factor of 4 with an increase in phase space density by a factor of 7. This achievement is based on the combination of two developments. First, a completely new type of electric trap allows molecules to be confined in predominantly homogeneous fields for 10s of seconds [2]. Second, the combination of mm-wave radiation with a narrow-band mid-infrared laser allows optical pumping among a closed set of rotational and vibrational molecular states. Improvements will allow cooling of molecules to Mikrokelvin temperatures in the near future, opening a route to experiments with molecular quantum-degenerate gases.

[1] M.Zeppenfeld et al., Phys. Rev. A 31, 365 (2004)

[2] B.G.U. Englert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., in press(arXiv:1107.2821)