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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 65: Poster – Cold Molecules (joint session MO/Q)
Q 65.14: Poster
Donnerstag, 13. März 2025, 17:00–19:00, Tent
Deep ultraviolet laser cooling of cadmium atoms and AlF molecules — •E. Padilla1, J. Cai1, S. Hofsäss1, L. Palanki2, R. Thomas1, S. Kray1, B. Sartakov1, G. Meijer1, S. Truppe2, and S. Wright1 — 1Fritz-Haber-Institut der MPG, Faradayweg 4-6, 14195 Berlin, Germany — 2CCM, Imperial, SW7 2AZ London, UK
Aluminium monofluoride (AlF) is a promising candidate for laser cooling and trapping at high densities. The primary laser cooling transition at 227.5 nm is extremely strong, highly vibrationally diagonal, and it is feasible to slow a molecular beam from 200 m/s to rest in 10 cm.
Since deep ultraviolet laser technology remains challenging, we first tested our experimental setup with a simple atomic system. The principal singlet-singlet transition from the electronic ground state in Cd, analogous to the laser cooling transition in AlF, lies conveniently near in wavelength at 229 nm. We demonstrate chirped frequency laser slowing on this transition using a buffer gas cooled Cd atomic beam, and load these atoms into a magneto-optical trap (MOT).
To study the efficacy of laser slowing AlF, we apply the pump-probe time-of-flight velocity measurement technique presented in [1]. This method relies only on rapid optical pumping of molecules between rotational levels of the electronic ground state, and allows efficiently measuring the velocity distribution in any rotational state. Applying chirped frequency laser slowing, we are able to slow molecules from 150 m/s to below 40 m/s in three different rotational states. This is the expected capture velocity of a molecular MOT of AlF.
[1] S Hofsäss et al 2021 New J. Phys. 23 075001
Keywords: Chirped frequency laser slowing; Deep ultraviolet laser; Cadmium; Aluminium monofluoride; Velocity distribution