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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik
MO 17: Poster: Cold Molecules
MO 17.3: Poster
Wednesday, March 13, 2024, 17:00–19:00, Tent C
Towards cooling and thermalisation of trapped polyatomic molecules — •Florian Jung, Jindaratsamee Phrompao, and Gerhard Rempe — Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Straße 1, 85748 Garching, Germany
Cold and controlled molecules offer a myriad of applications ranging from quantum computation to tests of fundamental physics. In particular, polyatomic molecules are of interest, as they exhibit emergent phenomena such as quasi-permanent electric dipole moments or chirality. Their applications are benefiting from or are even inconceivable without cooling the molecules to ultracold temperatures. To this end, increasing the ratio between elastic and inelastic collision rates to allow for collisional thermalisation is an important milestone.
Combining a cryogenic buffer-gas cell with a centrifuge decelerator and an electrostatic trap, trapping molecules for many seconds, we prepared densities of up to 107 cm−3 for CH3F molecules at 350 mK, allowing for observation and control of losses from inelastic dipolar collisions [1]. We expect that those can be further suppressed by opto-electrical Sisyphus cooling [2] for which we resort to the CF3CCH molecule, which seems suitable for this technique and exhibits a large electric dipole moment. This would pave the way for dense and ultracold samples of polyatomic molecules. However, the attractive properties of CF3CCH come with increased theoretical and experimental complexity, which we present here alongside preliminary measurements.
[1] M. Koller et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 203401 (2022).
[2] A. Prehn et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 063005 (2016).
Keywords: Polyatomic molecules; Cold molecules; Cold collisions; Controlled molecules; Cooling of molecules