Sympathetic Cooling and Slowing of Molecules with Rydberg Atoms

Creators: Zhang, Chi; Rittenhouse, Seth T.; Tscherbul, Timur V.; Sadeghpour, H. R.; Hutzler, Nicholas R.¹

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We propose to sympathetically slow and cool polar molecules in a cold, low-density beam using laser-cooled Rydberg atoms. The elastic collision cross sections between molecules and Rydberg atoms are large enough to efficiently thermalize the molecules even in a low-density environment. Molecules traveling at $100 m / s$ can be stopped in under 30 collisions with little inelastic loss. Our method does not require photon scattering from the molecules and can be generically applied to complex species for applications in precision measurement, quantum information science, and controlled chemistry.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Rosario Gonzalez-Ferez for preliminary calculations in the early stages of this work. We thank Yi Zeng, Ashay Patel, Weibin Li, Lan Cheng, Tim Steimle, Zack Lasner, Mike Tarbutt, and Gerard Higgins for helpful discussions. The work at Caltech has been supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Grant No. GBMF7947 and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant No. G-2019-12502. C. Z. acknowledges support from the David and Ellen Lee Postdoctoral Fellowship at Caltech. T. V. T. gratefully acknowledges support from the NSF CAREER Grant No. PHY-2045681. H. R. S. acknowledges support from the NSF through a grant for ITAMP at Harvard University.

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