Optical shielding of destructive chemical reactions between ultracold ground-state NaRb molecules

Abstract

We propose a method to suppress the chemical reactions between ultracold bosonic ground-state ${}^{23}$Na${}^{87}$Rb molecules based on optical shielding. By applying a laser with a frequency blue-detuned from the transition between the lowest rovibrational level of the electronic ground state $X^1{\Sigma }^{+}(v_X=0,j_X=0)$, and the long-lived excited level $b^3{\Pi }_0(v_b=0,j_b=1)$, the long-range dipole-dipole interaction between the colliding molecules can be engineered, leading to a dramatic suppression of reactive and photoinduced inelastic collisions, for both linear and circular laser polarizations. We demonstrate that the spontaneous emission from $b^3{\Pi }_0(v_b=0,j_b=1)$ does not deteriorate the shielding process. This opens the possibility for a strong increase of the lifetime of cold molecule traps, and for an efficient evaporative cooling. We also anticipate that the proposed mechanism is valid for alkali-metal diatomics with sufficiently large dipole-dipole interactions.

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Cited by in corpus (23)

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