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Q: Quantenoptik

Q 511: Fallen und Kühlung II

Q 511.7: Talk

Friday, March 8, 2002, 15:30–15:45, HS 22/B01

Trapping alkali dimers in a CO₂ laser trap — •Marcel Mudrich¹, Stephan Kraft¹, Jörg Lange¹, Daniel Comparat², and Matthias Weidemüller¹ — ¹Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg — ²Laboratoire Aimé Cotton, Orsay, France

Optical storage of cold molecules is an intriguing extension of trapping neutral atoms in optical dipole traps. Manipulation of the internal and external degrees of freedom with external fields as well as interaction studies are possible on a long time scale. Until now, molecules in the µK regime can only be created in MOTs trough photoassociation [1], and optical trapping of the ultracold molecules has been achieved only once using an optical dipole trap formed by the focus of a CO₂ laser [2].

We present estimates of transition rates between bound and unbound states due to the interaction of ultracold alkali dimers with the trapping light of a CO₂ laser. Vibrational transitions in heteronuclear dimers are studied in the protoype system LiCs. In the homonuclear case, transition strengths from the ground state to the continuum induced by 2^nd order spin-orbit coupling are compared to magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole transitions in Cs₂ and Rb₂. These processes leading to dissociation are opposed to direct photoassociation of cold molecules in the ground state by the trapping light.

[1] A. Fioretti et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 4402 (1998)

[2] T. Takekoshi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 5105 (1998)