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Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Ultracold Dipolar Gas of Fermionic 23Na40 K Molecules in Their Absolute Ground State
Jee Woo Park1, Sebastian A Will1, Martin W Zwierlein1
1MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Abstract:
We report on the creation of an ultracold dipolar gas of fermionic 23Na40 K molecules in their absolute rovibrational and hyperfine ground state. Starting from weakly bound Feshbach molecules, we demonstrate hyperfine resolved two-photon transfer into the singlet X 1Σ+|v=0,J=0⟩ ground state, coherently bridging a binding energy difference of 0.65 eV via stimulated rapid adiabatic passage. The spin-polarized, nearly quantum degenerate molecular gas displays a lifetime longer than 2.5 s, highlighting NaK's stability against two-body chemical reactions. A homogeneous electric field is applied to induce a dipole moment of up to 0.8 D. With these advances, the exploration of many-body physics with strongly dipolar Fermi gases of 23Na40K molecules is within experimental reach.
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The elements in group 18 are noble gases (helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon). They earned the name “noble” because they were assumed to be nonreactive since they have filled valence shells. In 1962, Dr. Neil Bartlett at the University of British Columbia proved this assumption to be false.

