A pump-probe study of the formation of rubidium molecules by ultrafast photoassociation of ultracold atoms

Abstract

An experimental pump-probe study of the photoassociative creation of translationally ultracold rubidium molecules is presented together with numerical simulations of the process. The formation of loosely bound excited-state dimers is observed as a first step towards a fully coherent pump-dump approach to the stabilization of Rb${}_2$ into its lowest ground vibrational states. The population that contributes to the pump-probe process is characterized and found to be distinct from a background population of pre-associated molecules.

Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. A (10 pages, 9 figures)

References in corpus (6)

• A High Phase-Space-Density Gas of Polar Molecules
• Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Molecules
• Ultracold Molecules in the Ro-Vibrational Triplet Ground State
• Optical pumping and vibrational cooling of molecules
• Making ultracold molecules in a two color pump-dump photoassociation scheme using chirped pulses
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Optimized production of ultracold ground-state molecules: Stabilization employing potentials with ion-pair character and strong spin-orbit coupling
• Demonstrating coherent control in 85Rb2 using ultrafast laser pulses: a theoretical outline of two experiments
• Effective approaches to the dynamical properties of two distinguishable Bose polarons