Radio Frequency Magneto-Optical Trapping of CaF with High Density

Loïc Anderegg; Benjamin L Augenbraun; Eunmi Chae; Boerge Hemmerling; Nicholas R Hutzler; Aakash Ravi; Alejandra Collopy; Jun Ye; Wolfgang Ketterle; John M Doyle

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.103201

Radio Frequency Magneto-Optical Trapping of CaF with High Density

Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Sep 8;119(10):103201. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.103201. Epub 2017 Sep 6.

Authors

Loïc Anderegg^{1

2}, Benjamin L Augenbraun^{1

2}, Eunmi Chae^{1

2}, Boerge Hemmerling^{1

2}, Nicholas R Hutzler^{1

2}, Aakash Ravi^{1

2}, Alejandra Collopy³, Jun Ye³, Wolfgang Ketterle^{2

4}, John M Doyle^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
² Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
³ JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.
⁴ Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.

PMID: 28949175
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.103201

Abstract

We demonstrate significantly improved magneto-optical trapping of molecules using a very slow cryogenic beam source and either rf modulated or dc magnetic fields. The rf magneto-optical trap (MOT) confines 1.0(3)×10^{5} CaF molecules at a density of 7(3)×10^{6} cm^{-3}, which is an order of magnitude greater than previous molecular MOTs. Near Doppler-limited temperatures of 340(20) μK are attained. The achieved density enables future work to directly load optical tweezers and create optical arrays for quantum simulation.