Observation of pendular butterfly Rydberg molecules

Abstract

Obtaining full control over the internal and external quantum states of molecules is the central goal of ultracold chemistry and allows for the study of coherent molecular dynamics, collisions and tests of fundamental laws of physics. When the molecules additionally have a permanent electric dipole moment, the study of dipolar quantum gases and spin-systems with long-range interactions as well as applications in quantum information processing are possible. Rydberg molecules constitute a class of exotic molecules, which are bound by the interaction between the Rydberg electron and the ground state atom. They exhibit extreme bond lengths of hundreds of Bohr radii and giant permanent dipole moments in the kilo-Debye range. A special type with exceptional properties are the so-called butterfly molecules, whose electron density resembles the shape of a butterfly. Here, we report on the photoassociation of butterfly Rydberg molecules and their orientation in a weak electric field. Starting from a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium atoms, we fully control the external degrees of freedom and spectroscopically resolve the rotational structure and the emerging pendular states in an external electric field. This not only allows us to extract the bond length, the dipole moment and the angular momentum of the molecule but also to deterministically create molecules with a tunable bond length and orientation. We anticipate direct applications in quantum chemistry, many-body quantum physics and quantum information processing.