Sensitive Detection of Cold Cesium Molecules by Radiative Feshbach Spectroscopy

Abstract

We observe the dynamic formation of $Cs_2$ molecules near Feshbach resonances in a cold sample of atomic cesium using an external probe beam. This method is 300 times more sensitive than previous atomic collision rate methods, and allows us to detect more than 20 weakly-coupled molecular states, with collisional formation cross sections as small as $σ=3\times 10^{-16}$cm$^2$. We propose a model to describe the atom-molecule coupling, and estimate that more than $2 \times 10^5$ $Cs_2$ molecules coexist in dynamical equilibrium with $10^8$ $Cs$ atoms in our trap for several seconds.