No Arabic abstract
Cooling the rotation and the vibration of molecules by broadband light sources was possible for trapped molecular ions or ultracold molecules. Because of a low power spectral density, the cooling timescale has never fell below than a few milliseconds. Here we report on rotational and vibrational cooling of a supersonic beam of barium monofluoride molecules in less than 440 $mu$s. Vibrational cooling was optimized by enhancing the spectral power density of a semiconductor light source at the underlying molecular transitions allowing us to transfer all the populations of $v=1-3$ into the vibrational ground state ($v=0$). Rotational cooling, that requires an efficient vibrational pumping, was then achieved. According to a Boltzmann fit, the rotation temperature was reduced by almost a factor of 10. In this fashion, the population of the lowest rotational levels increased by more than one order of magnitude.
We demonstrate rotational and vibrational cooling of cesium dimers by optical pumping techniques. We use two laser sources exciting all the populated rovibrational states, except a target state that thus behaves like a dark state where molecules pile up thanks to absorption-spontaneous emission cycles. We are able to accumulate photoassociated cold Cs2 molecules in their absolute ground state (v = 0, J = 0) with up to 40% efficiency. Given its simplicity, the method could be extended to other molecules and molecular beams. It also opens up general perspectives in laser cooling the external degrees of freedom of molecules.
We demonstrate rotational cooling of the silicon monoxide cation via optical pumping by a spectrally filtered broadband laser. Compared with diatomic hydrides, SiO+ is more challenging to cool because of its smaller rotational interval. However, the rotational level spacing and large dipole moment of SiO+ allows direct manipulation by microwaves, and the absence of hyperfine structure in its dominant isotopologue greatly reduces demands for pure quantum state preparation. These features make $^{28}$Si$^{16}$O+ a good candidate for future applications such as quantum information processing. Cooling to the ground rotational state is achieved on a 100 ms time scale and attains a population of 94(3)%, with an equivalent temperature $T=0.53(6)$ K. We also describe a novel spectral-filtering approach to cool into arbitrary rotational states and use it to demonstrate a narrow rotational population distribution ($Npm1$) around a selected state.
We have identified a novel phase stability mechanism from the intracavity field-induced self-organization of a fast-moving molecular beam into travelling molecular packets in the bad cavity regime, which is then used to decelerate the molecular packets by feedback-controlled time-varying laser pumps to the cavity. We first applied the linear stability analysis to derive an expression for this self-organization in the adiabatic limit and show that the self-organization of the beam leads to the formation of travelling molecular packets, which in turn function as a dynamic Bragg grating, thus modulating periodically the intracavity field by superradiant scattering of the pump photons. The modulation encodes the position information of the molecular packets into the output of the intracavity field instantaneously. We then applied time-varying laser pumps that are automatically switched by the output of the intracavity field to slow down the molecular packets via a feedback mechanism and found that most of the molecules in the molecular packets are decelerated to zero central velocity after tens of stages. Our cavity-based deceleration proposal works well in the bad cavity regime, which is very different from the conventional cavity- based cooling strategies where a good cavity is preferred. Practical issues in realizing the proposal are also discussed.
Heavy diatomic molecules have been identified as good candidates for use in electron electric dipole moment (eEDM) searches. Suitable molecular species can be produced in pulsed beams, but with a total flux and/or temporal evolution that varies significantly from pulse to pulse. These variations can degrade the experimental sensitivity to changes in spin precession phase of an electri- cally polarized state, which is the observable of interest for an eEDM measurement. We present two methods for measurement of the phase that provide immunity to beam temporal variations, and make it possible to reach shot-noise-limited sensitivity. Each method employs rapid projection of the spin state onto both components of an orthonormal basis. We demonstrate both methods using the eEDM-sensitive H state of thorium monoxide (ThO), and use one of them to measure the magnetic moment of this state with increased accuracy relative to previous determinations.
Robust cooling and nondestructive imaging are prerequisites for many emerging applications of neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezers, such as their use in quantum information science and analog quantum simulation. The tasks of cooling and imaging can be challenged, however, by the presence of large trap-induced shifts of their respective optical transitions. Here, we explore a system of $^{39}$K atoms trapped in a near-detuned ($780$ nm) optical tweezer, which leads to relatively minor differential (ground vs. excited state) Stark shifts. We demonstrate that simple and robust loading, cooling, and imaging can be achieved through a combined addressing of the D$_textrm{1}$ and D$_textrm{2}$ transitions. While imaging on the D$_textrm{2}$ transition, we can simultaneously apply $Lambda$-enhanced gray molasses (GM) on the D$_textrm{1}$ transition, preserving low backgrounds for single-atom imaging through spectral filtering. Using D$_textrm{1}$ cooling during and after trap loading, we demonstrate enhanced loading efficiencies as well as cooling to low temperatures. These results suggest a simple and robust path for loading and cooling large arrays of potassium atoms in optical tweezers through the use of resource-efficient near-detuned optical tweezers and GM cooling.