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Updated: Jul 11, 2025

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Extended Rotational Coherence of Polar Molecules in an Elliptically Polarized Trap
Annie J Park1,2,3, Lewis R B Picard1,2,3, Gabriel E Patenotte1,2,3
1Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Abstract:
We demonstrate long rotational coherence of individual polar molecules in the motional ground state of an optical trap. In the present, previously unexplored regime, the rotational eigenstates of molecules are dominantly quantized by trapping light rather than static fields, and the main source of decoherence is differential light shift. In an optical tweezer array of NaCs molecules, we achieve a three-orders-of-magnitude reduction in differential light shift by changing the trap's polarization from linear to a specific "magic" ellipticity. With spin-echo pulses, we measure a rotational coherence time of 62(3) ms (one pulse) and 250(40) ms (up to 72 pulses), surpassing the projected duration of resonant dipole-dipole entangling gates by orders of magnitude.
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