Extended Rotational Coherence of Polar Molecules in an Elliptically Polarized Trap

Annie J Park; Lewis R B Picard; Gabriel E Patenotte; Jessie T Zhang; Till Rosenband; Kang-Kuen Ni

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.183401

Extended Rotational Coherence of Polar Molecules in an Elliptically Polarized Trap

Phys Rev Lett. 2023 Nov 3;131(18):183401. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.183401.

Authors

Annie J Park^{1

2

3}, Lewis R B Picard^{1

2

3}, Gabriel E Patenotte^{1

2

3}, Jessie T Zhang^{1

2

3}, Till Rosenband⁴, Kang-Kuen Ni^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
² Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
³ Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
⁴ Agendile LLC, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140, USA.

PMID: 37977633
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.183401

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.