Prospects for the cavity-assisted laser cooling of molecules

Abstract

Cooling of molecules via free-space dissipative scattering of photons is thought not to be practicable due to the inherently large number of Raman loss channels available to molecules and the prohibitive expense of building multiple repumping laser systems. The use of an optical cavity to enhance coherent Rayleigh scattering into a decaying cavity mode has been suggested as a potential method to mitigate Raman loss, thereby enabling the laser cooling of molecules to ultracold temperatures. We discuss the possibility of cavity-assisted laser cooling particles without closed transitions, identify conditions necessary to achieve efficient cooling, and suggest solutions given experimental constraints. Specifically, it is shown that cooperativities much greater than unity are required for cooling without loss, and that this could be achieved via the superradiant scattering associated with intracavity self-localization of the molecules. Particular emphasis is given to the polar hydroxyl radical (OH), cold samples of which are readily obtained from Stark deceleration.

18 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (6)

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• Deceleration of molecules in a supersonic beam by the optical field in a low-finesse cavity
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• Cavity-induced phase stability to decelerate a fast molecular beam via feedback-controlled time-varying optical pumps
• Superradiance-assisted two-color Doppler cooling of molecules