Few- to many-body physics with ground state bosonic NaK polar molecules

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Immanuel Bloch; Dr. Xin-Yu Luo
• Subject Area: Optics, Quantum Optics and Physics of Atoms, Molecules and Plasmas
• Term: from 2016 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 258183570

The project aims at producing high phase space density samples of ultracold polar molecules. In order to achieve that, Na and K atoms are brought into the molecular ground state via photoassociation processes. In this second project phase of the research unit, we plan to improve our efficiency of the molecular association process by employing 3D optical lattices, which should allow us to produce high phase space density samples of the molecules while at the same time minimizing molecular loss processes. In addition, we plan to explore novel evaporative cooling strategies of polar molecules in optical lattices. Such novel cooling processes could prove to be crucial to further improve the degeneracy of the molecular quantum gases and thereby bring them into a regime, where many-body physics of long range interacting quantum gases becomes accessible. Exploring such novel quantum phases and their dynamics is one of the long term goals of the project within this research unit.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2247: From few to many-body physics with dipolar quantum gases