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Molecular physics

Very cool molecular ions

Nature Physics volume 6, pages 240–241 (2010)Cite this article

Achieving full control over all internal and external degrees of freedom of a molecule has been a long-standing goal in molecular physics. Newly developed methods to prepare translationally, vibrationally and rotationally cold molecular ions have brought this target one step closer.

Over the past decades atomic and molecular physics has been through a scientific revolution, fuelled by the advent of methods to cool atoms to extremely low temperatures (that is, significantly below 1 K). During the past 15 years in particular, considerable efforts have been invested into developing techniques suitable for cooling the translational motion of molecules and molecular ions1. The ability to produce samples of 'ultracold' molecules promises to enable a variety of new experiments, ranging from tests of fundamental concepts such as the time invariance of physical constants2, to the study of quantum phenomena in chemical reactions at very low and precisely defined collision energies3,4,5, to the implementation of molecular quantum bits for quantum information processing6. Such advanced experiments, however, require both the cooling of the translational motion of the molecules and the precise control over their internal quantum state. This goal has remained elusive for a long time, and has only recently been achieved by several groups for neutral diatomic molecules formed from ultracold atomic gases (see, for example, refs 7 and 8). However, control over the internal degrees of freedom has not been achieved in translationally cold molecular ions until now. Writing in Nature Physics, Peter Staanum et al.9 and Tobias Schneider et al.10 report that they have independently prepared ensembles of trapped molecular ions that are not only translationally cold, but that also show a high degree of internal quantum-state purity.

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Figure 1: Chill out.

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  1. Stefan Willitsch is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 80, 4056 Basel, Switzerland. stefan.willitsch@unibas.ch,

    Stefan Willitsch

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Willitsch, S. Very cool molecular ions. Nature Phys 6, 240–241 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1643

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