Optical Trapping of a Polyatomic Molecule in an ℓ-Type Parity Doublet State

Christian Hallas; Nathaniel B Vilas; Loïc Anderegg; Paige Robichaud; Andrew Winnicki; Chaoqun Zhang; Lan Cheng; John M Doyle

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.153202

Optical Trapping of a Polyatomic Molecule in an ℓ-Type Parity Doublet State

Phys Rev Lett. 2023 Apr 14;130(15):153202. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.153202.

Authors

Christian Hallas^{1

2}, Nathaniel B Vilas^{1

2}, Loïc Anderegg^{1

2}, Paige Robichaud^{1

2}, Andrew Winnicki^{1

2}, Chaoqun Zhang³, Lan Cheng³, John M Doyle^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
² Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
³ Department of Chemistry, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA.

PMID: 37115898
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.153202

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.