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ULTRACOLD GASES

Quo vadis now, cold molecules?

Nature Physics volume 14, pages 873–874 (2018)Cite this article

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Cooling molecules down to their ground state is an ongoing challenge for atomic and molecular physicists. Further steps in this journey have recently been made, with promising implications.

Ultracold molecules with motional temperatures below 1 µK have proved much more elusive to make than their atomic counterparts. The latter, recognized by Nobel Prizes in Physics for laser cooling in 1997 and Bose–Einstein condensation in 2001, are now widely used for ultraprecise measurements and exploring exotic physics in the quantum domain. Ultracold molecules could open new avenues of chemistry to explore1,2. Like ultracold atoms, they also could be used in tests of fundamental particle physics with ‘tabletop’ experiments3 or in quantum simulations of complex many-body systems4, or serve as quantum bits (qubits) for quantum information processing5. Writing in Nature Physics, Vincent Barbé and colleagues6 have taken an essential first step in realizing a new class of cold ground-state molecules that have both an electric and a magnetic dipole moment. Their work now makes it look promising to assemble two already cold Rb and Sr atoms to make a cold RbSr molecule.

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Fig. 1: A cold gas of Sr (blue) and Rb (yellow) atoms.

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  1. Joint Quantum Institute, NIST and the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Paul S. Julienne

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  1. Paul S. Julienne
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Correspondence to Paul S. Julienne.

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Julienne, P.S. Quo vadis now, cold molecules?. Nature Phys 14, 873–874 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0260-3

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