High Density Loading and Collisional Loss of Laser-Cooled Molecules in an Optical Trap.

We report optical trapping of laser-cooled molecules at sufficient density to observe molecule-molecule collisions for the first time in a bulk gas. SrF molecules from a red-detuned magneto-optical trap (MOT) are compressed and cooled in a blue-detuned MOT. Roughly 30% of these molecules are loaded into an optical dipole trap with peak number density n_{0}≈3×10^{10} cm^{-3} and temperature T≈40 µK. We observe two-body loss with rate coefficient ß=2.7_{-0.8}^{+1.2}×10^{-10} cm^{3} s^{-1}. Achieving this density and temperature opens a path to evaporative cooling towards quantum degeneracy of laser-cooled molecules.

Polarization Enhanced Deep Optical Dipole Trapping of Λ-Cooled Polar Molecules.

We demonstrate loading of SrF molecules into an optical dipole trap (ODT) via in-trap Λ-enhanced gray molasses cooling. We find that this cooling can be optimized by a proper choice of relative ODT and cooling beam polarizations. In this optimized configuration, we observe molecules with temperatures as low as 14(1) µK in traps with depths up to 570 µK. With optimized parameters, we transfer ∼5% of molecules from our radio-frequency magneto-optical trap into the ODT, at a density of ∼2×10^{9} cm^{-3}, a phase space density of ∼2×10^{-7}, and with a trap lifetime of ∼1 s.

Laser cooling of ions in a neutral plasma.

Laser cooling of a neutral plasma is a challenging task because of the high temperatures typically associated with the plasma state. By using an ultracold neutral plasma created by photoionization of an ultracold atomic gas, we avoid this obstacle and demonstrate laser cooling of ions in a neutral plasma. After 135 microseconds of cooling, we observed a reduction in ion temperature by up to a factor of four, with the temperature reaching as low as 50(4) millikelvin. This pushes laboratory studies of neutral plasmas deeper into the strongly coupled regime, beyond the limits of validity of current kinetic theories for calculating transport properties. The same optical forces also retard the plasma expansion, opening avenues for neutral-plasma confinement and manipulation.