Static-Field Shielding of Bosonic Molecules: Evaporation to Degeneracy and Self-Bound Droplets
The strong, tunable dipolar interactions of ultracold molecules make them a powerful platform for quantum many-body physics, but reaching degeneracy by evaporative cooling requires suppressing inelastic collisions. Microwave collisional shielding has enabled the preparation of degenerate Fermi gases and Bose-Einstein condensates of polar molecules, whereas static electric field shielding has been limited to fermionic species, which are less prone to inelastic loss. We demonstrate static-field Förster shielding of bosonic $^{23}$Na$^{87}$Rb molecules, suppressing two-body loss by up to four orders of magnitude. Within a bound-state-free electric-field window, three-body loss is also strongly suppressed, enabling efficient evaporation. Evaporating with an efficiency of 2.09(9), we increase the phase-space density of the gas by two orders of magnitude, reaching degeneracy with 7200(1000) molecules. We observe self-bound droplets at the end of evaporation over a wide range of field strengths, emerging from either degenerate or non-degenerate parent gases. We perform Path Integral Monte Carlo simulations, which suggest that the observed droplets are filamentary in nature, and find good agreement with the experimentally observed droplet formation temperatures. Our results establish Förster shielding as a single-field route to prepare degenerate gases and self-bound droplets of bosonic polar molecules.