Life extension of ultracold molecules. Free Technical Library News

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Increasing the life of ultracold molecules

17.08.2021

The study of molecules cooled to very low temperatures is important for the development of quantum simulations, precision measurements, ultracold chemistry, and more. To do this, physicists need to learn how to cool them, collect and hold them, and also protect them from destruction. The latter factor significantly limits the range of experiments and phenomena that scientists could investigate in such systems.

The main channel for the decay of ultracold molecules is their inelastic collisions with each other. To avoid them, scientists use screening, that is, the creation of additional repulsion between molecules at distances at which inelastic interaction processes begin. To date, shielding of atoms and molecules has already been implemented by many different methods. For example, scientists have learned how to protect ultracold KRb molecules from each other using constant electric fields. Despite the progress made, physicists are constantly looking for new regimes that would increase the lifetime of such molecules.

Researchers from Korea and the US, with the participation of Tijs Karman from the University of Cambridge, used microwave radiation to shield two CaF molecules held by optical tweezers from each other. They showed that by controlling the parameters of the external fields, it is possible to switch molecules between the screening and anti-screening modes, changing their lifetime by a factor of 24.

The idea of such screening is based on the concept of "dressed" states. If a two-level system is irradiated ("clothed") with a resonant alternating field, then the population of its states will oscillate with the Rabi frequency. By controlling the field parameters, it is possible to ensure that between molecules in "dressed" states, a strong long-range dipole-dipole interaction arises, which can be both attractive and repulsive. The latter depends, among other things, on which states are "dressed" by the field.

To implement this principle, the authors preliminarily prepared two CaF molecules, each caught in its own trap of optical tweezers, by applying a magnetic field of 27 gauss. After that, physicists for some time pushed them together in the presence of a microwave field, carried them in different directions and, using the lambda imaging method, looked at whether they fell apart or not. Thus, the scientists were able to plot the proportion of "surviving" molecules depending on the time of interaction. By changing the configuration of "dressed" states, the authors could influence this number by comparing it with the number of "naked" molecules that were not exposed to microwaves.

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