Erlangen 2022 – scientific programme

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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 19: Poster 3

MO 19.14: Poster

Thursday, March 17, 2022, 16:30–18:30, P

Progress on Zeeman slowing of CaF — •Mariia Stepanova, Timo Poll, Paul Kaebert, Supeng Xu, Mirco Siercke, and Silke Ospelkaus — Institut für Quantenoptik, Leibniz Universität Hannover

Recently, great progress has been made in direct laser cooling of molecules to temperatures close to absolute zero. However, experiments are limited by the number of molecules that can be captured from molecular beams using typical laser-based trapping methods. In Petzold et al. 2018, we proposed to transfer Zeeman deceleration to laser-coolable molecules and thus substantially increase the number of molecules that can be captured by e.g. magneto-optical traps. Here, we now present our characterisation of the Zeeman force for CaF molecules, Kaebert et al. 2021. We find excellent agreement of the force with an optical Bloch equation model. This shows that the generated force profile can compress the initial molecular velocity distribution from a standard buffer gas cell to the velocity required for trapping in a magneto-optical trap (MOT). We present the current status of our experiment as well as theoretical work on a novel Bayesian-optimised molecular MOT scheme for CaF molecules.