Rovibrational cooling of molecules by optical pumping

Abstract

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.

arXiv comment4 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (11)

• Laser cooling of a diatomic molecule
• Quantum Gas of Deeply Bound Ground State Molecules
• Optical pumping and vibrational cooling of molecules
• Controlling the hyperfine state of rovibronic ground-state polar molecules
• Coherent transfer of photoassociated molecules into the rovibrational ground state
• Magneto-Optical Trap for Polar Molecules
• Opto-Electrical Cooling of Polar Molecules
• Molecular vibrational cooling by Optical Pumping with shaped femtosecond pulses
• Optical pulse-shaping for internal cooling of molecules
• Triplet-singlet conversion by broadband optical pumping
• Application of lasers to ultracold atoms and molecules

Cited by in corpus (27)

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• Production of rovibronic ground state RbCs molecules via two-photon cascade decay
• Photoassociation of ultracold LiRb* molecules: observation of high efficiency and unitarity-limited rate saturation
• Quantum phases of quadrupolar Fermi gases in optical lattices
• Dissipative binding of atoms by non-conservative forces
• Rotational cooling of trapped polyatomic molecules
• Cooling molecular vibrations with shaped laser pulses: Optimal control theory exploiting the timescale separation between coherent excitation and spontaneous emission
• Enantio-conversion of chiral mixtures via optical pumping
• Equivalence between free quantum particles and those in harmonic potentials and its application to instantaneous changes
• Rovibrational optical cooling of a molecular beam
• Proposal for the formation of ultracold deeply-bound RbSr dipolar molecules by all-optical methods
• Quantum simulation of many-body spin interactions with ultracold polar molecules
• Thermometry of Guided Molecular Beams from a Cryogenic Buffer-Gas Cell
• Dynamical process of optically trapped singlet ground state ${}^{85}$Rb${}^{133}$Cs molecules produced via short-range photoassociation
• Laser cooling of rotation and vibration by optical pumping
• Comparative study of monotonically convergent optimization algorithms for the control of molecular rotation
• Production of translationally cold barium monohalide ions
• Impact of Decoherence on Internal State Cooling using Optical Frequency Combs
• A proposal for sympathetically cooling neutral molecules using cold ions
• Manipulating scattering of ultracold atoms with light-induced dissipation
• Photoassociative cooling and trapping of a pair of interacting atoms
• Features of Molecular Structure Beneficial for Optical Pumping
• Highly spin-polarized molecules via collisional microwave pumping