Loss of ultracold 87Rb133Cs molecules via optical excitation of long-lived two-body collision complexes

Gregory, P.D.; Blackmore, J.A.; Bromley, S.L.; Cornish, S.L.

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.124.163402

Loss of ultracold 87Rb133Cs molecules via optical excitation of long-lived two-body collision complexes

Gregory, P.D.; Blackmore, J.A.; Bromley, S.L.; Cornish, S.L.

Authors

P.D. Gregory

J.A. Blackmore

S.L. Bromley

Professor Simon Cornish s.l.cornish@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

We show that the lifetime of ultracold ground-state 87Rb133Cs molecules in an optical trap is limited by fast optical excitation of long-lived two-body collision complexes. We partially suppress this loss mechanism by applying square-wave modulation to the trap intensity, such that the molecules spend 75% of each modulation cycle in the dark. By varying the modulation frequency, we show that the lifetime of the collision complex is 0.53 0.06 ms in the dark. We find that the rate of optical excitation of the collision complex is 3þ4 −2 × 103 W−1 cm2 s−1 for λ ¼ 1550 nm, leading to a lifetime of < 100 ns for typical trap intensities. These results explain the two-body loss observed in experiments on nonreactive bialkali molecules.

Citation

Gregory, P., Blackmore, J., Bromley, S., & Cornish, S. (2020). Loss of ultracold 87Rb133Cs molecules via optical excitation of long-lived two-body collision complexes. Physical Review Letters, 124(16), Article 163402. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.124.163402

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 27, 2020
Online Publication Date	Apr 23, 2020
Publication Date	Apr 24, 2020
Deposit Date	Feb 11, 2020
Publicly Available Date	Apr 24, 2020
Journal	Physical Review Letters
Print ISSN	0031-9007
Electronic ISSN	1079-7114
Publisher	American Physical Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	124
Issue	16
Article Number	163402
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.124.163402
Related Public URLs	https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04431

Files

Published Journal Article (509 Kb)
PDF

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

Copyright Statement
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.