Schedule Apr 27, 2007
Making Cold Molecules and Correlated States with Microwave Fields
Svetlana Kotochigova (NIST)

We propose a new mechanism to produce ultracold polar molecules with microwavefield. The proposed mechanism converts trapped ultracold atoms of differentspecies into vibrationally excited molecules by a single microwave transitionand entirely depends on the existence of a permanent dipole moment in themolecules. As opposed to production of molecules by photoassociation ormagnetic-field Feshbach resonances our method does not rely on the structureand lifetime of excited states or existence of Feshbach resonances. We alsoexplore the possibility to produce vibrationally cold molecules by combiningthe microwave field with an optical Raman transition or by applying a microwavefield to Feshbach molecules.

Controllable dipole-dipole interaction between polar molecules lies at the heartof our proposal to exploit entanglement as an essential resource for stronglycorrelated many-body states. Even though polar molecules have a permanentelectronic dipole moment, for any rotational state it averages to zero. Wepropose that a dipole moment is easily induced in a J=0 state by applying amicrowave field with a frequency that is close to the J = 0 to J = 1 resonance.Moreover, we investigate conditions under which the relevant states for amicrowave transition have exactly the same AC Stark shift to minimize the fieldperturbations.

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