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Updated: Dec 10, 2025

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Resonant Dipolar Collisions of Ultracold Molecules Induced by Microwave Dressing
Zoe Z Yan1, Jee Woo Park2, Yiqi Ni1
1MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Abstract:
We demonstrate microwave dressing on ultracold, fermionic ^{23}Na^{40}K ground-state molecules and observe resonant dipolar collisions with cross sections exceeding 3 times the s-wave unitarity limit. The origin of these interactions is the resonant alignment of the approaching molecules' dipoles along the intermolecular axis, which leads to strong attraction. We explain our observations with a conceptually simple two-state picture based on the Condon approximation. Furthermore, we perform coupled-channel calculations that agree well with the experimentally observed collision rates. The resonant microwave-induced collisions found here enable controlled, strong interactions between molecules, of immediate use for experiments in optical lattices.
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