Engineering the sub-Doppler force in magneto-optical traps

authored by

S. Xu, P. Kaebert, M. Stepanova, T. Poll, M. Siercke, S. Ospelkaus

Abstract

Current dual-frequency magneto-optical traps (MOTs) for ultracold molecules are plagued by sub-Doppler heating effects, making them vastly inferior to standard atomic MOTs. Here we demonstrate theoretically that the sub-Doppler effects in such a MOT can be engineered to provide cooling instead of heating. We give an intuitive picture how to achieve such cooling and show the cooling and trapping force results of the 16-level optical Bloch equations for the case of CaF molecules. From three-dimensional Monte Carlo simulations we estimate the temperature and density of our MOT to be 40μK and 4×108cm-3, respectively, for a molecule number of 1×105. We also extend our idea to the case of atomic MOTs and show that it can be used to produce sub-Doppler forces in these systems that are much more robust against magnetic fields.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Quantum Optics
QuantumFrontiers

Type

Article

Journal

Physical Review Research

Volume

4

ISSN

2643-1564

Publication date

10.2022

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Physics and Astronomy(all)

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L042036 (Access: Open)