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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 13: Posters 3: Cold Molecules, Helium Nano Droplets, and Experimental Techniques

MO 13.15: Poster

Mittwoch, 19. März 2014, 16:30–18:30, Spree-Palais

Sympathetic cooling of OH⁻ ions using Rb atoms in a MOT — •Henry Lopez¹, Bastian Höltkemeier¹, Julian Glässel¹, Pascal Weckesser¹, Eric Endres², Thorsten Best², Roland Wester², and Matthias Weidemüller¹ — ¹Physikalisches Institut, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Deutschland — ²Institut für Ionenphysik und Angewandte Physik, Universität Innsbruck, Österreich

Molecular ions are usually caught in high-order multipole radio frequency traps and cooled sympathetically by He buffer gas. In order to reach lower temperatures for a wider range of molecular ions we investigate replacing He with laser-cooled atoms. In particular, we use a new hybrid ion-atom trap to study the interaction of ultracold Rb atoms with mass-selected OH⁻-water clusters. While the Rb atoms are stored in a Dark-SPOT trap loaded from a 2D-MOT, the ions are trapped in an octupole radio frequency trap consisting of thin wires, enabling optical access to the trapping region. For efficient cooling a dense cloud of atoms is needed, preferably in the ground state to avoid inelastic collisions. In our setup we trap up to 4 × 10⁸ atoms at peak densities of up to 3 × 10¹¹ atoms/cm³ with almost all atoms being in the absolute ground state. For these parameters our numerical simulations suggest that cooling the ions by at least one order of magnitude can be achieved. On this poster I report on the status of our experiment, its limitations and possible applications.