Rosario González-Férez¹and Christiane P. Koch²

¹Instituto Carlos I de Física Teórica y Computacional and Departamento de Física Atómica, Molecular y Nuclear, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain

²Theoretische Physik, Universit&amul;t Kassel, Heinrich-Plett-Strasse 40, 34132 Kassel, Germany

Photoassociation, assembling molecules from atoms using laser light, is limited by the low density of atom pairs at sufficiently short interatomic separations. Here we show that nonresonant light with intensities of the order of 10¹⁰W/cm² modifies the thermal cloud of atoms, enhancing the Boltzmann weight of shaperesonances and pushing scattering states below the dissociation limit [1]. This leads to an enhancement of photoassociation rates by several orders of magnitude and opens the way to significantly larger numbers of ground-state molecules in a thermal ensemble than achieved so far.

[1] Rosario González-Férez and Christiane P. Koch,Phy. Rev. A 86, 063420 (2012)