Abstract
For over two decades, ultracold neutral atoms have served as workhorses
in experimental quantum science. Their indistinguishability, available
internal states featuring long coherence times or large dipole moments,
low configuration entropy, and ability to be manipulated with
electromagnetic fields make them ideally suited for applications ranging
across quantum many-body physics and quantum simulation, quantum
networks, quantum information processing, precision measurements, and
the study of cold collisions. Spurred by these successes, there has been
a flurry of activity to bring neutral molecules under the same level of
control. Here, we propose a bottom-up solution to gain single particle
control of ultracold molecules for the first time.
We use optical tweezers to deterministically assemble a single NaCs molecule in a single quantum state from a pair of Na and Cs atoms [1]. In the process, we realize a conceptually simple platform for studying atomic collisions and molecular spectra which derives its strength from the ability to gather ``before" and ``after" images of single atoms [2].
1. Liu, L. R., Hood, J. D., Yu, Y., Zhang, J. T., Wang, K., Lin, Y.-W., Rosenband, T., & Ni, K. PRX 9, 2 (2019).
2. Liu, L. R., Hood, J. D., Yu, Y., Zhang, J. T., Hutzler, N. R., Rosenband, T., & Ni, K. K. Science 360, 6391 (2018).
We use optical tweezers to deterministically assemble a single NaCs molecule in a single quantum state from a pair of Na and Cs atoms [1]. In the process, we realize a conceptually simple platform for studying atomic collisions and molecular spectra which derives its strength from the ability to gather ``before" and ``after" images of single atoms [2].
1. Liu, L. R., Hood, J. D., Yu, Y., Zhang, J. T., Wang, K., Lin, Y.-W., Rosenband, T., & Ni, K. PRX 9, 2 (2019).
2. Liu, L. R., Hood, J. D., Yu, Y., Zhang, J. T., Hutzler, N. R., Rosenband, T., & Ni, K. K. Science 360, 6391 (2018).