Improving the efficiency of ultracold dipolar molecule formation by first loading onto an optical lattice

Abstract

Ultracold ground state dipolar 40K-87Rb molecules have recently been produced in a loose harmonic trap by employing a magnetic field sweep across a Feshbach resonance followed by stimulated Raman adiabatic passage [K.-K. Ni et al., Science 322, 231 (2008)]. The overall experimental efficiency for molecule formation was around 20%. We show that the efficiency can be increased to nearly 100% if one first loads the atomic gases into an optical lattice of the appropriate depth and tunes the interspecies attraction to have exactly one atom of each species at an occupied lattice site. Our proposed scheme provides a large enhancement to the dipolar molecule density even at relatively high temperatures, and avoids three-body recombination loss by preventing lattice sites from being triply occupied.

(5 pages, 3 pages, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett.)

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• The Role of Interspecies Interactions in the Preparation of a Low-entropy Gas of Polar Molecules in a Lattice
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• Efficiency for preforming molecules from mixtures of light Fermi and heavy Bose atoms in optical lattices: the strong-coupling-expansion method
• Feshbach modulation spectroscopy
• Ultracold and dense samples of ground-state molecules in lattice potentials