Two-photon optical shielding of collisions between ultracold polar molecules

Abstract

We propose a method to engineer repulsive long-range interactions between ultracold ground-state molecules using optical fields, thus preventing short-range collisional losses. It maps the microwave coupling recently used for collisional shielding onto a two-photon transition, and takes advantage of optical control techniques. In contrast to one-photon optical shielding [Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 153202 (2020)], this scheme avoids heating of the molecular gas due to photon scattering. The proposed protocol, exemplified for 23Na39K, should be applicable to a large class of polar diatomic molecules.

References in corpus (7)

• Ultracold dense samples of dipolar RbCs molecules in the rovibrational and hyperfine ground state
• Ultracold Dipolar Gas of Fermionic ${}^{23}$Na${}^{40}$K Molecules in their Absolute Ground State
• Evaporation of microwave-shielded polar molecules to quantum degeneracy
• Strong dependence of ultracold chemical rates on electric dipole moments
• Tuning ultracold collisions of excited rotational dipolar molecules
• Hyperfine structure of alkali-metal diatomic molecules
• Collisional losses of ultracold molecules due to intermediate complex formation

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Microwave shielding of bosonic NaRb molecules
• Scheme for Deterministic Loading of Laser-Cooled Molecules into Optical Tweezers
• Ultracold Interactions between Ions and Polar Molecules
• Thermal behavior of Bose-Einstein condensates of polar molecules
• Ultracold coherent control of molecular collisions at a Förster resonance
• Strongly dipolar molecular Bose-Einstein condensates: From few- to many-body physics