Abstract

Ultracold molecules are interesting for the study of cold chemistry, cold collisions, astrochemistry and quantum information processing. Their preparation, in particular of ultracold ground state molecules, however, is still challenging. One class of preparation strategies are optical methods, which have been enormously successful for atoms. Adapted versions of laser cooling, which try to optimize optical pumping into the molecular ground state, have been proposed [1], but their efficiency is limited by the absence of closed transitions in molecules. A more viable avenue seems the use of cavities for cooling, which would avoid the leakage by open transitions. For instance, efficient cavity cooling of the external degrees of freedom has been proposed in Refs. [2]. For atoms, cavity cooling was recently demonstrated [3].

© 2007 IEEE