Jul 17 – 22, 2022
Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto
America/Toronto timezone

Functionalized Aromatic Molecules for Laser Cooling and Trapping

Jul 19, 2022, 5:00 PM
1h 30m
Hart House (Hart House)

Hart House

Hart House

7 Hart House Cir, Toronto, ON M5S 3H3
Poster presentation Structure and properties of atoms, ions, and molecules Poster session

Description

Laser cooling relies on photon cycling, which can be enabled in polyatomic molecules when an “optical cycling center” (OCC) is attached to an electronegative ligand. It was proposed that molecules with a (metal) alkaline-earth(I)-oxide-radical structure, would have good OCC properties and, thus, would be amenable to laser cooling [1]. More recent theoretical work has indicated that the alkaline-earth(I)-oxide unit attached to a benzene ring would offer a good OCC that would be tunable by substituting the ring hydrogen atoms with more electronegative species [2]. Theory has also indicated that larger rings (such as naphthalene, pyrene, and coronene) can also provide good optical cycling properties [3]. We report the results of dispersed fluorescence measurements on CaO-Ph-X (Ph : phenyl, X = F, CH3, CF3) in a cryogenic buffer gas at 9 K. We find that the vibrational branching ratio (VBR) to the ground vibrational state is ~95% for all species and 99% for CaO-Ph-3,4,5F [4]. We also study the napthol-based molecules CaO-Nap and SrO-Nap, and find that the 2-naphthyl positional variant of CaO-Nap also has a highly diagonal VBR, 96% [5]. These results demonstrate that the same principles that have led to laser cooling of di-, tri- and poly-atomic molecules (e.g. SrF, CaOH and CaOCH3) can likely be extended to phenolic and aromatic molecules.

[1] Kozyryev, et al, ChemPhysChem 2016, 17, 3641
[2] Dickerson, et al, PRL 2021, 126, 123002
[3] Dickerson, et al, JPCL 2021, 12, 3989–3995
[4] Zhu, et al, 2022, arXiv:2202.01881
[5] Mitra, et al, 2022, arXiv:2202.01685

Presenter name Debayan Mitra
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Primary author

Dr Debayan Mitra (Columbia University)

Co-authors

Dr Guozhu Zhu (UCLA) Dr Zack Lasner (Harvard University) Dr Benjamin Augenbraun (Harvard University) Claire Dickerson (UCLA) Guanming Lao (UCLA) Michael Frim (Harvard University) Austin Bailey (UCLA) Prof. Justin Caram (UCLA) Prof. Anastassia Alexandrova (UCLA) Prof. Wes Campbell (UCLA) Prof. Eric Hudson (UCLA) Prof. John Doyle (Harvard University)

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