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EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation

Sympathetic cooling of molecular ions with ultracold atoms

Eric R. Hudson

Published Dec 1, 2016• 42 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Sympathetic cooling of molecular ions with ultracold gases is enabling a new era of research in chemistry and physics. There has been much progress in this new field in the last several years and many unanticipated challenges have been overcome. The aim of the present manuscript is to provide a concise review of this work and discuss the way forward for the field.

DOI
10.1140/epjti/s40485-016-0035-0

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Sympathetic cooling of molecular ions with ultracold gases is enabling a new era of research in chemistry and physics. There has been much progress in this new field in the last several years and many unanticipated challenges have been overcome. The aim of the present manuscript is to provide a concise review of this work and discuss the way forward for the field.
We propose a method for the production of ultracold molecular ions. This method utilizes sympathetic cooling due to the strong collisions between appropriately chosen molecular ions and laser-cooled neutral atoms to realize ultracold internal ground-state molecular ions. In contrast to other experiments producing cold molecular ions, our proposed method efficiently cools both the internal and external molecular-ion degrees of freedom. The availability of an ultracold, absolute ground-state sample of molecular ions would have broad impact to fields as diverse as quantum chemistry, astrophysics, and fundamental physics and may lead to the development of a robust scalable quantum computer.
One of the current themes in quantum physics is the creation of cold ( 1 K) molecules to study molecule-molecule, molecule-atom, and molecule-radiation interactions under these novel low-temperature conditions. This book highlights the field of cold trapped molecular ions. In particular, the development of a novel, universal cooling method for charged particles, sympathetic cooling using laser-cooled atoms, together with the experimental and computational techniques required are extensively reviewed. The book also reviews first spectacular applications of the cold ion ensembles produced: the study of the properties of cold non-neutral plasmas, the study of ion-neutral chemical reactions and of photodissociation processes, and high-resolution rotational overtone spectroscopy of cold hydrogen molecular ions with unprecedented spectral resolution. The large potential of this field of research and its possible impact to other fields of physics, chemistry, and biology are highlighted. The book summarizes the main lines of research in cold trapped molecular ion physics, thus, making it useful as an introduction for advanced students and experienced researchers.
Cooling a range of molecules to ultracold temperatures (<1 mK) is a difficult but important challenge in molecular physics and chemistry. Collective cavity cooling of molecules is a promising method that does not rely on molecular energy level and thus can be applied to all molecules in principle. However, the initial lack of cold molecules leads to the difficulty in its experimental implementation. We show that efficient collective sympathetic cooling of molecules to sub-mK temperatures using a large ensemble of atoms within a cavity is feasible. This approach is a new type of sympathetic cooling which does not rely on direct collisions between atoms and molecules, but utilizes thermalization via their mutual interaction with a cavity field. Two important mechanisms are identified. This include: (1) giant enhancement of cavity optical field from the efficient scattering of the pump light by the atoms; (2) cavity-mediated collective interaction between the atoms and the molecules. We show an optimal cavity detuning for maximizing cooling, which is dependent on the atom and molecule numbers. We determine a threshold for the molecular pump strength and show that it is independent of molecule number when the number of atoms is much greater than the molecules. This can be reduced by orders of magnitude when compared to cavity cooling of single molecular species only. Using this new sympathetic cavity cooling technique, cooling molecules to sub-mK within a high-Q cavity could be within reach of experimental demonstration.
Progress on research in the field of molecules at cold and ultracold temperatures is reported in this review. It covers extensively the experimental methods to produce, detect and characterize cold and ultracold molecules including association of ultracold atoms, deceleration by external fields and kinematic cooling. Confinement of molecules in different kinds of traps is also discussed. The basic theoretical issues related to the knowledge of the molecular structure, the atom–molecule and molecule–molecule mutual interactions, and to their possible manipulation and control with external fields, are reviewed. A short discussion on the broad area of applications completes the review.
Translationally cold, spatially localised molecular ions prepared by sympathetic cooling with laser-cooled atomic ions in ion traps have recently found a wide range of applications in both chemistry and physics. The very low temperatures of the ions (down to millikelvins), their tight localisation in the trap and the ability to control and manipulate single isolated molecules on the quantum level offer intriguing possibilities for new experiments in the realms of cold chemistry, precision molecular spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and quantum technology. The present article gives an overview of the basic experimental methods, current topics and recent developments in this field.