Abstract
Polar molecules have bright prospects for novel quantum gases with long-range and anisotropic interactions1, and could find uses in quantum information science2 and in precision measurements3,4,5. However, high-density clouds of ultracold polar molecules have so far not been produced. Here, we report a key step towards this goal. We start from an ultracold dense gas of loosely bound 40K87Rb Feshbach molecules6,7 with typical binding energies of a few hundred kilohertz, and coherently transfer these molecules in a single transfer step into a vibrational level of the ground-state molecular potential bound by more than 10 GHz. Starting with a single initial state prepared with Feshbach association8, we achieve a transfer efficiency of 84%. Given favourable Franck–Condon factors9,10, the presented technique can be extended to access much more deeply bound vibrational levels and those exhibiting a significant dipole moment.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge financial support from NIST, NSF and DOE. K.-K.N. and B.N. acknowledge support from the NSF, S.O. from the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation and P.S.J. from the ONR. We thank D. Wang for stimulating discussions and C. Ospelkaus for critical reading of the manuscript.
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Ospelkaus, S., Pe’er, A., Ni, KK. et al. Efficient state transfer in an ultracold dense gas of heteronuclear molecules. Nature Phys 4, 622–626 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys997
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys997
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