Speaker
Description
We present a detailed quantum treatment of the optical trap for molecules and its extension to the case when the optical trap is embedded within a uniform electrostatic field. For polar molecules, the resulting electro-optical trap [1] offers significant advantages over trapping by an optical field alone that include increased trap depth, apart from orienting the trapped molecules. The quantum effects involved in enhancing the effective inhomogeneity of the optical field (due to a focused Gaussian laser beam) by a uniform electrostatic field as well as the enhancement of molecular orientation due to the electrostatic field by the optical field have been of interest in their own right [2] and explored herein in the context of molecular trapping. Both enhancement effects are quite subtle and have to do with the synergy of the two collinear permanent and induced dipole interactions that derives from their distinct eigenenergy level structures and the avoided crossings that arise from their combination.
Moreover, the electro-optical trap offers the possibility to lift the degeneracy of the ±M levels as well as to rapidly vary both the orientation and trap depth by tilting the polarization plane of the optical field with respect to the electrostatic field.
Electro-optical trapping via a certain oriented state of a polar polarizable molecule amounts to state preparation of this particular directional state. The electro-optical trap or tweezer may thus facilitate key applications of molecular trapping, especially in quantum computing and simulation and detailed collision stereodynamics that distinguishes between heads versus tails in molecular encounters.
The added electrostatic field automatically implements dipolar shielding. Alternatively, the synergistic enhancement of the trap depth of an electro-optical trap affords a reduced intensity of the optical field which would foster microwave shielding of the elastic channel and thereby the elastic-to-inelastic collision rate. The electrostatic field may also decouple hyperfine levels and thereby prolong the rotational coherence times achieved so far in an optical field alone.
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B. Friedrich: An electro-optical trap for polar molecules, Phys. Rev. A 105, 053126 (2022).
https://journals.aps.org/pra/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevA.105.053126 -
K. Schatz, B. Friedrich, S. Becker, and B. Schmidt: Symmetric tops in combined electric fields: Conditional quasisolvability via the quantum Hamilton-Jacobi theory, Phys. Rev. A 97, 053417 (2018). https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.97.053417
| Abstract Number (department-wise) | MP 06 |
|---|---|
| Department | MP (Meijer) |
