Collisions in a dual-species magneto-optical trap of molecules and atoms

Jurgilas, S.; Chakraborty, A.; Rich, C.J.H.; Sauer, B.E.; Frye, Matthew D.; Hutson, Jeremy M.; Tarbutt, MR

doi:10.1088/1367-2630/ac0c9a

Collisions in a dual-species magneto-optical trap of molecules and atoms

Jurgilas, S.; Chakraborty, A.; Rich, C.J.H.; Sauer, B.E.; Frye, Matthew D.; Hutson, Jeremy M.; Tarbutt, MR

Authors

S. Jurgilas

A. Chakraborty

C.J.H. Rich

B.E. Sauer

Matthew Frye matthew.frye@durham.ac.uk
Academic Visitor

Professor Jeremy Hutson j.m.hutson@durham.ac.uk
Professor

MR Tarbutt

Abstract

We study inelastic collisions between CaF molecules and 87Rb atoms in a dual-species magneto-optical trap. The presence of atoms increases the loss rate of molecules from the trap. By measuring the loss rates and density distributions, we determine a collisional loss rate coefficient k2 = (1.43 ± 0.29) × 10−10 cm3 s−1 at a temperature of 2.4 mK. We show that this is not substantially changed by light-induced collisions or by varying the populations of excited-state atoms and molecules. The observed loss rate is close to the universal rate expected in the presence of fast loss at short range, and can be explained by rotation-changing collisions in the ground electronic state.

Citation

Jurgilas, S., Chakraborty, A., Rich, C., Sauer, B., Frye, M. D., Hutson, J. M., & Tarbutt, M. (2021). Collisions in a dual-species magneto-optical trap of molecules and atoms. New Journal of Physics, 23(7), Article 075004. https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ac0c9a

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jun 18, 2021
Online Publication Date	Jul 8, 2021
Publication Date	2021-07
Deposit Date	Oct 7, 2021
Publicly Available Date	Nov 26, 2021
Journal	New Journal of Physics
Publisher	IOP Publishing
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	23
Issue	7
Article Number	075004
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ac0c9a
Related Public URLs	https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09990

Files

Published Journal Article (Advance online version) (2.3 Mb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.