Absorption spectroscopy for laser cooling and high-fidelity detection of barium monofluoride molecules

Abstract

Currently, there is great interest in laser cooling of barium monofluoride (BaF) molecules for precision tests of fundamental symmetries. We use high-resolution absorption spectroscopy to characterize several as yet imprecisely known transition frequencies required to realize such cooling. We extract an improved set of molecular constants for the bosonic 138Ba19F and 136Ba19F isotopologues, confirm the existence of a significant hyperfine splitting in the excited state of the laser cooling cycle, and investigate the effects of this splitting on the achievable cooling forces. As a direct application of our spectroscopic insights, we experimentally demonstrate nearly background-free fluorescence imaging of a BaF molecular beam in a glass cell vacuum chamber. We expect such high-fidelity detection to be useful for various types of precision measurement scenarios.

10 pages, 7 figures

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• Hyperfine resolved optical spectroscopy of the A${}^2\Pi \leftarrow$X${}^2{\Sigma }^{+}$ transition in MgF
• Benchmarking of the Fock space coupled cluster method and uncertainty estimation: Magnetic hyperfine interaction in the excited state of BaF
• Enhancing dipolar interactions between molecules using state-dependent optical tweezer traps
• Saturated absorption spectroscopy of buffer-gas-cooled Barium monofluoride molecules
• Entanglement via rotational blockade of MgF molecules in a magic potential
• King-plot analysis of isotope shifts in simple diatomic molecules
• Measurement of Doppler effects in cryogenic buffer-gas cell

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Quantum state manipulation and cooling of ultracold molecules
• Three-dimensional Magneto-optical Trapping of Barium Monofluoride
• Laser cooling of barium monofluoride molecules using synthesized optical spectra
• Isotopologue-selective laser cooling of molecules
• Hyperfine structure of the ${\mathbf{A}}^1\mathbf{\Pi }$ state of AlCl and its relevance to laser cooling and trapping
• Laser cooled 137BaF molecules for measuring nuclear-spin-dependent parity violation
• Molecular laser cooling using serrodynes: Implementation, characterization and prospects
• Magnetic hyperfine structure constants of ${}^{137}$BaF in the ${}^2{\Pi }_{1/2}$ and ${}^2{\Pi }_{3/2}$ excited states
• High-resolution spectroscopy of barium monofluoride: Odd isotopologues, hyperfine structure and isotope shifts
• Axion-mediated electron-nucleus and electron-electron interactions in barium monofluoride molecule
• A novel method to determine the phase-space distribution of a pulsed molecular beam
• Global isotopic analysis of hyperfine-resolved rotational spectroscopic data for barium monofluoride, BaF
• Optical pumping and laser slowing of a heavy molecule