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Applied Physics Express

Temperature measurement of ultracold molecules by time evolution of photoionization signal

Zhonghao Li, Jinpeng Yuan, Zhonghua Ji, Yanting Zhao, Tengfei Meng, Liantuan Xiao, Suotang Jia

Published Sep 1, 2014• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A simple and reliable method is used for the temperature measurement of ultracold molecules prepared in a magnetooptical trap (MOT). This method is based on the case where the initial distribution of an atomic or molecular sample is a Gaussian function of position and velocity. The atoms or molecules are detected by a sensitive photoionization detection technique. We obtain the temperature of molecules by analyzing the evolution of a photoionization signal. We compare the results of atomic temperature with the measurements by the release recapture technique (R&R), and find reasonable agreement. This provides a complementary method of determining the temperature of ultracold atoms and molecules.

DOI
10.7567/apex.7.096602

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A simple and reliable method is used for the temperature measurement of ultracold molecules prepared in a magnetooptical trap (MOT). This method is based on the case where the initial distribution of an atomic or molecular sample is a Gaussian function of position and velocity. The atoms or molecules are detected by a sensitive photoionization detection technique. We obtain the temperature of molecules by analyzing the evolution of a photoionization signal. We compare the results of atomic temperature with the measurements by the release recapture technique (R&R), and find reasonable agreement. This provides a complementary method of determining the temperature of ultracold atoms and molecules.
Ultracold Cs2 molecules have been formed by photoassociation. Using the multiphoton ionization technique, we measure the time-evolution of expanding process in ultracold Cs2 molecule system and obtain the decay curve of photoionization signals. Based on a simple case, where the initial distribution of atomic or molecular sample is a Gaussian function of position and of velocity, we get the sample's temperature by theoretical simulation. The result shows a reasonable agreement with the result of release-recapture method in cold atom sample. This method avoids the disadvantage of detecting the weakly fluorescence and can be widely used for measuring the temperature in cold atom or cold molecule system.
We report the basic idea and experimental demonstration of measuring the temperature of cold cesium atomic cloud confined in a magneto-optical trap (MOT) by analyzing absorption spectrum observed in the short-distance time-of-flight (TOF) method. Compared with the conventional TOF scheme, we measure the temperature of cold atomic cloud in MOT by short-distance TOF method for our small vapor cell. If the cold atomic cloud is released, it will fall and expand due to gravity and its initial velocity distribution. Utilizing a cylindrical resonant probe beam positioned several millimeters beneath the MOT (in this paper, we analyzed the cases for 3mm, 5mm, and 8mm of center-to-center distance between the MOT region and the probe beam, respectively), we can record the short-distance TOF absorption spectrum with a photodiode when cold atoms go through the probe region. Analysis of the short-distance TOF absorption spectrum yields the effective temperature of the cold cloud in MOT.
Photoassociation of ultracold atoms is an important method for producing stable ultracold molecules with extensive applications. Ion spectroscopy technique, which has higher sensitivity compared with trap loss spectroscopy and fragment spectroscopy, plays an important pole in the research of photoassociation spectroscopy. Based on ion spectroscopy technique, a complete experimental system is employed to produce and detect the ultracold ground state molecules, including the equipment of photoionization and time-of-fight mass spectroscopy. Ultra-cold ground state cesium molecules are demonstrated by the ionization detection technique. The number of the ground-state molecules produced in our MOT is measured. In addition, the relationship of the time interval of the cesium atom ion and the cesium molecular ion to the metal grid voltage is studied for the optimization of the experimental parameters.
We discuss a simple time of flight technique for measurement of temperature of a cold cloud in a magneto-optical trap (MOT). The technique is based on spatiotemporal fluorescence imaging of the cloud that is allowed to undergo one-dimensional expansion in the presence of the orthogonal two-dimensional configuration of laser beams by temporal modulation of a pair of counterpropagating trapping beams in the MOT. We show that, in the time scale 0< or =t<5 ms, the expansion of the cloud is ballistic and the temperature can be extracted from the time variation of the rms size of the cloud in the expansion direction. The reliability of the technique has been established by comparing the results with release and recapture method, and also by fitting them to the known temperature scaling law.
We prepare nS (n = 49) cesium Rydberg atoms by two-photon excitation in a standard magnetooptical trap to obtain the spatial distribution of the Rydberg atoms by measuring the time-of-flight (TOF) spectra in the case of a low Rydberg density. We analyze the time evolution of the ultracold nS Rydberg atoms distribution by changing the delay time of the pulsed ionization field, defined as the duration from the moment of switching off the excitation lasers to the time of switching on the ionization field. TOF spectra of Rydberg atoms are observed as a function of the delay time and initial Rydberg atomic density. The corresponding full widths at half maximum (FWHMs) are obtained by fitting the spectra with a Gaussian profile. The FWHM decreases with increasing delay time at a relatively high Rydberg atom density (>5 × 107/cm3) because of the decreasing Coulomb interaction between released charges during their flight to the detector. The temperature of the cold atoms is deduced from the dependence of the TOF spectra on the delay time under the condition of low Rydberg atom density.
A new spectroscopic method that utilizes microwave transition of ultracold molecules is demonstrated. The narrow spectral linewidth (approximately 100 Hz) was guaranteed by preparing molecules at low temperature, and a high signal-to-noise ratio was achieved by preparing a significant fraction of molecules in the target internal state. The repetition rate of the experiment was approximately 10 Hz, which was only limited by the time needed to load ultracold atoms into the magneto-optical trap. To demonstrate the performance, we investigated the hyperfine structures of the vibrational ground states of the and states of KRb molecules. This technique not only allows us to pursue the narrow-line laser cooling of KRb molecules, but also provided us with essential information for realizing precision spectroscopies e.g., the search for the temporal variation of the electron-to-proton mass ratio.