Creation of a strongly dipolar gas of ultracold ground-state $^{23}\rm{Na}^{87}\rm{Rb}$ molecules
Mingyang Guo, Bing Zhu, Bo Lü, Xin Ye, Fudong Wang, Romain Véxiau, Nadia Bouloufa-Maafa, Goulven Quéméner, Olivier Dulieu, Dajun Wang
Abstract
We report the successful production of an ultracold sample of absolute ground-state $^{23}\rm{Na}^{87}\rm{Rb}$ molecules with a large induced electric dipole moment. Starting from weakly-bound Feshbach molecules formed via magneto-association, the lowest rovibrational and hyperfine level of the electronic ground state is populated following a high efficiency and high resolution two-photon Raman process. The high purity absolute ground-state samples have up to 8000 molecules and densities of over $10^{11}$ cm$^{-3}$. With an external electric field, we have induced an effective dipole moment over one Debye, enough to provide truly strong and long-range dipolar interactions. Bimolecular reaction between ground-state $^{23}\rm{Na}^{87}\rm{Rb}$ molecules is endothermic, but we still observed a rather fast decay of the molecular sample. Our results pave the way toward investigation of ultracold molecular collisions in a fully controlled manner, and possibly to quantum gases of ultracold bosonic molecules with strong dipolar interactions.