Conveyor-belt magneto-optical trapping of molecules

Abstract

Laser cooling is used to produce ultracold atoms and molecules for quantum science and precision measurement applications. Molecules are more challenging to cool than atoms due to their vibrational and rotational internal degrees of freedom. Molecular rotations lead to the use of type-II transitions ($F \geq F'$) for magneto-optical trapping (MOT). When typical red detuned light frequencies are applied to these transitions, sub-Doppler heating is induced, resulting in higher temperatures and larger molecular cloud sizes than realized with the type-I MOTs most often used with atoms. To improve type-II MOTs, Jarvis et al. PRL 120, 083201 (2018) proposed a blue-detuned MOT to be applied after initial cooling and capture with a red-detuned MOT. This was successfully implemented (Burau et al. PRL 130, 193401 (2023), Jorapur et al. PRL 132, 163403 (2024), Li et al. PRL 132, 233402 (2024)), realizing colder and denser molecular samples. Very recently, Hallas et al. arXiv:2404.03636 (2024) demonstrated a blue-detuned MOT with a "1+2" configuration that resulted in even stronger compression of the molecular cloud. Here, we describe and characterize theoretically the conveyor-belt mechanism that underlies this observed enhanced compression. We perform numerical simulations of the conveyor-belt mechanism using both stochastic Schr\"odinger equation (SSE) and optical Bloch equation (OBE) approaches. We investigate the conveyor-belt MOT characteristics in relation to laser parameters, g-factors, and the structure of the molecular system.