Making Molecules at MicroKelvin

Abstract

The production of molecules with translational kinetic energies small compared to kT at 1 mK (“ultracold”) has only just been observed in 1998. Here proposals and experiments based on photoassociation (free —> bound absorption) of ultracold atoms [1] (recently reviewed in references [2,3, 4]) which produce translationally ultracold molecules will be briefly surveyed. The use of ultracold photoassociation (Sect. 2) to form ultracold molecules (Sect. 3) is a major long term goal at the University of Connecticut. Such ultracold molecules could be used for molecule trapping, for the molecular analog of atom optics, for study of highly quantum-mechanical, resonancedominated ultracold collisions, for fundamental nucleation studies, for formation of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) and for production of molecule lasers (i.e. coherent beams of state-selected molecules). A separate and much more extensive review of ultracold molecule formation has recently appeared [5].