Preparation of an ultra-cold sample of ammonia molecules for precision measurements

Abstract

We present experiments in which an ultra-cold sample of ammonia molecules is released from an electrostatic trap and recaptured after a variable time. It is shown that, by performing adiabatic cooling before releasing the molecules and adiabatic re-compression after they are recaptured, we are able to observe molecules even after more than 10 ms of free expansion. A coherent measurement performed during this time will have a statistical uncertainty that decreases approximately as the inverse of the square root of the expansion time. This offers interesting prospects for high-resolution spectroscopy and precision tests of fundamental physics theories.

References in corpus (4)

• Stability of the proton-to-electron mass ratio
• Using Molecules to Measure Nuclear Spin-Dependent Parity Violation
• Trapping molecules on a chip in traveling potential wells
• Static trapping of polar molecules in a traveling wave decelerator

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Adiabatic Channel Capture Theory Applied to Cold Atom-Molecule Reactions: Li + CaH -> LiH + Ca at 1 K
• High-resolution 'magic'-field spectroscopy on trapped polyatomic molecules
• Measurements of trap dynamics of cold OH molecules using resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization
• Sensitive Low-Recoil VUV 1+1${}^{\prime }$ REMPI Detection of ND${}_3$