Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Cooling of Molecules in Optical Cavities

Weiping Lu, Y. Zhao, P. F. Barker

Published Jun 1, 2007• 1 citation

Abstract

Inspired by the great success in laser cooling of atoms, scientists now want to create cold molecules to study their applications that have already realized for cold atoms. However, a simple extension of laser cooling techniques fails for molecules because complex energy structure of most molecules makes a closed multi-level system impossible. Buffer gas cooling is a general scheme that can produce cold paramagnetic molecules at temperatures of hundreds milikelvin (mK). The next requirement for this field to be successful is to develop new and complementary techniques that can break the mK bottleneck and produce a dense molecular samples in microkelvin (muK) region. In this report, we study a general optical cavity cooling scheme to cool molecular species from hundreds mK to muK temperature region.

DOI: 10.1109/cleoe-iqec.2007.4386721

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