Formation of high-density cold molecules via electromagnetic trap

Abstract

The preparation and control of cold molecules are advancing rapidly, motivated by many exciting applications, ranging from tests of fundamental physics to quantum information processing. Here, we proposed a trapping scheme to create high-density cold molecular samples using a combination of electric and magnetic fields. In our theoretical analysis and numerical calculations, a typical alkaline-earth monofluoride, MgF, is used to test the feasibility of our proposal. A cold MgF molecular beam is firstly produced via an electrostatic Stark decelerator and then loaded into the proposed electromagnetic trap, which is composed of an anti-Helmholtz coil, an octupole, and two disk electrodes. Following that, a huge magnetic force is applied to the molecular sample at an appropriate time, which enables further compressing of the spatial distribution of the cold sample. Molecular samples with both higher number density and smaller volume are quite suitable for the next step of laser confinement and other molecular experiments such as cold collisions.

Steering photoassociation of cold 85Rb atoms by two-color slowly-turned-on and rapidly-turned-off laser pulses

“…Cold molecules have aroused much interest from researchers [1][2][3][4][5], due to the wide applications in areas such as the measurement of fundamental physical constants [6][7][8], quantum information [9,10] and collision reaction [11][12][13][14]. In order to produce cold molecules, researchers proposed direct and * Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed.…”