Photoassociation adiabatic passage of ultracold Rb atoms to form ultracold Rb_2 molecules

Abstract

We theoretically explore photoassociation by Adiabatic Passage of two colliding cold ^{85}Rb atoms in an atomic trap to form an ultracold Rb_2 molecule. We consider the incoherent thermal nature of the scattering process in a trap and show that coherent manipulations of the atomic ensemble, such as adiabatic passage, are feasible if performed within the coherence time window dictated by the temperature, which is relatively long for cold atoms. We show that a sequence of ~2*10^7 pulses of moderate intensities, each lasting ~750 ns, can photoassociate a large fraction of the atomic ensemble at temperature of 100 microkelvin and density of 10^{11} atoms/cm^3. Use of multiple pulse sequences makes it possible to populate the ground vibrational state. Employing spontaneous decay from a selected excited state, one can accumulate the molecules in a narrow distribution of vibrational states in the ground electronic potential. Alternatively, by removing the created molecules from the beam path between pulse sets, one can create a low-density ensemble of molecules in their ground ro-vibrational state.

arXiv commentRevTex, 23 pages, 9 figures

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• Formation of deeply bound molecules via chainwise adiabatic passage
• Dynamical interferences to probe short-pulse photoassociation of Rb atoms and stabilization of Rb_2 dimers
• Achieving ground-state polar molecular condensates by chainwise atom-molecule adiabatic passage
• Proposal for the formation of ultracold deeply-bound RbSr dipolar molecules by all-optical methods
• Quantum phase transition in a three-level atom-molecule system
• Interaction-induced instability and chaos in the photoassociative stimulated Raman adiabatic passage from atomic to molecular Bose-Einstein condensates
• Pulsed Adiabatic Photoassociation via Scattering Resonances
• Enhancing molecular conversion efficiency by a magnetic field pulse sequence
• Efficiency limitation for realizing an atom-molecule adiabatic transfer based on a chainwise system
• Optimal population transfer in combined Feshbach Resonance and STIRAP process
• Detecting high density ultracold molecules using atom-molecule collision