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Published on: February 5, 2017
Optical Trapping of a Polyatomic Molecule in an ℓ-Type Parity Doublet State
Christian Hallas1,2, Nathaniel B Vilas1,2, Loïc Anderegg1,2
1Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Abstract:
We report optical trapping of a polyatomic molecule, calcium monohydroxide (CaOH). CaOH molecules from a magneto-optical trap are sub-Doppler laser cooled to 20(3) μK in free space and loaded into an optical dipole trap. We attain an in-trap molecule number density of 3(1)×10^{9} cm^{-3} at a temperature of 57(8) μK. Trapped CaOH molecules are optically pumped into an excited vibrational bending mode, whose ℓ-type parity doublet structure is a potential resource for a wide range of proposed quantum science applications with polyatomic molecules. We measure the spontaneous, radiative lifetime of this bending mode state to be ∼0.7 s.
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