Ultracold molecules provide a powerful and versatile platform for quantum computing,simulation, and metrology applications. The cornerstone technique for generating these cold, dense samples of molecular gasses is the magneto-optical trap (MOT). Conventional molecular MOTs use red-detuned light, limiting them to relatively high temperatures and low densities, leading to small spatial overlap and low loading efficiency...

Platforms based on molecules manipulated using ‘optical tweezers’ might be able to perform complex physics calculations. Physicists have taken the first step towards building quantum computers out of individual molecules trapped with laser devices called optical tweezers. Two teams report their results in Science on 7 December in both cases making pairs of calcium monofluoride...

Physics World recognizes Professor John Doyle’s lab for creating some of the world’s first ultracold polyatomic molecules. The lab produced sodium hydroxide at 110 µK.

Molecular tweezer arrays provide a powerful and versatile platform for quantum computing and simulation applications. This is due to the long coherence time, strong dipole-dipole couplings between neighboring polar molecules, and single-site addressability in the system. Recently, by using the rotational states of single CaF molecules trapped in individual tweezers as effective qubits, we have...

The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) and the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) Committee, have awarded the Lila Albin Award for the Best Indoor Environmental Quality Paper for 2020 to the Doyle group. The paper is entitled: Assessment and Mitigation of Aerosol Airborne SARS-CoV-2 Transmission in Laboratory and Office Environments.

One of the fundamental questions in the study of ultracold polar molecules is “what happens when two molecules collide at ultracold temperatures?” Knowing whether the molecules undergo chemical reactions, form long lived complexes, change internal state, or bounce off each other carries important implications which will guide future research directions. Our recent experiment explores this...

Ultracold molecules have been proposed as a rich resource for many applications ranging from precision measurements and quantum metrology to quantum simulation and quantum information processing. The benefits of molecules in all these applications arise from the many internal degrees of freedom in a molecule. For example, even with the simplest diatomic molecules, one has...

Although the Standard Model of particle physics, one of the triumphs of modern physics, accurately describes all particle physics measurements made in laboratories so far, it is unable to answer many questions that arise from cosmological observations, such as the long-standing puzzle of why matter dominates over antimatter throughout the observable universe. To explain these...

Ultracold molecules have been proposed as a rich resource for many applications ranging from precision measurements and quantum metrology to quantum simulation and quantum information processing. The benefits of molecules in all these applications arise from the many internal degrees of freedom in a molecule. For example, even with the simplest two-atom diatomic molecules, one...

In the simplest molecues, diatomic molecules made form two atoms, the vibration and rotation degrees of freedom gives rise to new features such as strong long-range dipolar interactions between molecules, a key ingredient in many quantum simulation and quantum computing proposals. Polyatomic molecules are an exciting new research frontier, as these molecules offer an even...

The BEC conference is a biannual meeting which is regarded the most prestigious and competitive conference in the field of atomic quantum gases, featuring about 45 invited presentations. Several CUA researchers presented invited talks: