Schedule Mar 15, 2013
Evaporative Cooling for Polar Molecules
Matthew T. Hummon, Benjamin K. Stuhl, Mark Yeo, Hao Wu, David Reens, Alejandra Collopy, and Jun Ye (JILA, Univ. of Colorado and NIST)

We report the observation of microwave-forced evaporative cooling of hydroxyl (OH) molecules loaded from a Stark-decelerated beam into an extremely high-gradient magnetic quadrupole trap. We demonstrate cooling by at least an order of magnitude in temperature and three orders in phase-space density, limited only by the low-temperature sensitivity of our spectroscopic thermometry technique, microwave-depletion pulsed laser induced fluorescence (PLIF).  We also present work toward development of a new spectroscopic thermometry technique, optical-depletion PLIF, which should be capable of probing lower temperatures.



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