Direct laser cooling of a symmetric top molecule
Direct laser cooling of a symmetric top molecule
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DOI：
10.1126/science.abc5357
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发表时间：
2020-09-11
期刊：
影响因子：
56.9
通讯作者：
Doyle, John M.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Mitra, Debayan;Vilas, Nathaniel B.;Doyle, John M.
超冷多原子分子在量子模拟与计算、粒子物理和量子化学等领域有着潜在的广泛应用。对于原子和小分子，直接激光冷却已被证明是超冷状态下量子科学的有力工具。然而，由于结构复杂，激光冷却较大的非线性多原子分子的可行性仍然是未知的。我们用激光冷却了对称的顶部分子单氧氧化钙（CaOCH3），将类似于10(4)的分子的一维温度从22 +/- 1毫开尔文降低到1.8 +/- 0.7毫开尔文，并对两个核自旋异构体进行了状态选择性冷却。这些结果表明，使用适当的振子跃迁可以实现非线性分子的激光冷却，从而为手性分子的有效冷却开辟了一条道路，并最终实现复杂多原子物质的光镊阵列。
Ultracold polyatomic molecules have potentially wide-ranging applications in quantum simulation and computation, particle physics, and quantum chemistry. For atoms and small molecules, direct laser cooling has proven to be a powerful tool for quantum science in the uftracold regime. However, the feasibility of laser-cooling larger, nonlinear polyatomic molecules has remained unknown because of their complex structure. We laser-cooled the symmetric top molecule calcium monomethoxide (CaOCH3), reducing the temperature of similar to 10(4) molecules from 22 +/- 1 millikelvin to 1.8 +/- 0.7 millikelvin in one dimension and state-selectively cooling two nuclear spin isomers. These results demonstrate that the use of proper rovibronic transitions enables laser cooling of nonlinear molecules, thereby opening a path to efficient cooling of chiral molecules and, eventually, optical tweezer arrays of complex polyatomic species.