Quantum control of ultracold polar molecules

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A gas of ultracold polar molecules, arranged as a regular array, will make an ideal quantum simulator of strongly-interacting quantum systems. This project will focus on creating this system, starting from molecules captured in a magneto-optical trap. The first part of the project is to investigate sub-Doppler cooling processes in the molecular magneto-optical trap and use these to cool the molecules to sub-milliKelvin temperatures. The next step will be to investigate collisions between atoms and molecules at ultracold temperatures. This will be done by overlapping a cloud of cold molecules with a cloud of ultracold atoms, first in a magneto-optical trap, then in a magnetic trap, and finally in a microwave trap. There is currently very little information about elastic and inelastic collisional processes at these very low temperatures, so this investigation will yield a wealth of new knowledge. Using the results of this study, we will sympathetically cool the molecules using the atoms. By driving an evaporative cooling process, the atoms can be cooled to sub-micro-Kelvin temperatures while keeping the molecules in thermal equilibrium with the atoms through elastic collisions. This provides a route to a dense gas of ultracold polar molecules. Finally, single molecules from this gas will be captured using optical tweezer traps, and the coherent manipulation of individual molecules and molecule pairs will be investigated.