Prospects for making polar molecules with microwave fields

Abstract

We propose a new mechanism to produce ultracold polar molecules with microwave fields. The proposed mechanism converts trapped ultracold atoms of different species into vibrationally excited molecules by a single microwave transition and entirely depends on the existence of a permanent dipole moment in the molecules. As opposed to production of molecules by photoassociation or magnetic-field Feshbach resonances our method does not rely on the structure and lifetime of excited states or existence of Feshbach resonances. In addition, we determine conditions for optimal creation of polar molecules in vibrationally excited states of the ground-state potential by changing frequency and intensity of the microwave field. We also explore the possibility to produce vibrationally cold molecules by combining the microwave field with an optical Raman transition or by applying a microwave field to Feshbach molecules. The production mechanism is illustrated for two polar molecules: KRb and RbCs.

4 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (17)

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• Ab initio calculation of the KRb dipole moments

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Strongly interacting ultracold polar molecules
• Structure and melting behavior of classical bilayer crystals of dipoles
• Impact of Electric Fields on Highly Excited Rovibrational States of Polar Dimers
• Laser control of ultracold molecule formation: The case of RbSr
• Laser-Assisted Self-Induced Feshbach resonance for ultracold polar molecule formation
• Vibrational ladder-descending photostabilization of a weakly bound molecule: Quantum optimal control with a genetic algorithm
• Formation of deeply bound polar molecules combining pump-dump pulses with infrared radiation