Special Colloquium, February 2, 2004

Cooling and trapping OH molecules

Heather Lewandowski

JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology

The advent of laser cooling and Bose-Einstein condensation has transformed atomic physics. Cold molecules, with their richer internal structure, offer many new exciting research opportunities including high resolution spectroscopy, precision measurements, and novel collision studies. We create cold molecules by using the well understood phenomenon of supersonic expansion to cool molecules and the Stark effect to slow the resulting molecules into the rest frame of the laboratory. The cooled and slowed molecules are then trapped using electrostatic fields.

10:00 a.m., Smith Laboratory, Room 1094