Laser cooling of thallium chloride: A theoretical investigation

The possibility of laser cooling of thallium chloride (TlCl) molecules has been investigated based on high-level ab initio calculations with the consideration of the core-valence and the spin-orbit coupling (SOC) effects. The potential energy curves of the 13 Λ-S states as well as the 24 Ω states split from them via SOC are obtained by multi-reference configuration interaction plus the Davidson correction. We show that the a $$ transition of TlCl is a possible candidate for laser cooling, which features highly diagonal Franck-Condon factors and no intermediate interacting electronic states. Based on our calculations, we propose an optical cycling scheme by utilizing four lasers at wavelengths around 320 nm with more than 10⁴ cycles for photon absorption/emission and a sub-microkelvin temperature limit.