Efficient production of polar molecular Bose-Einstein condensates via an all-optical R-type atom-molecule adiabatic passage

TL;DR

This paper introduces an all-optical R-type adiabatic passage scheme for efficiently producing polar molecular Bose-Einstein condensates from ultracold atoms, enabling low-power photoassociation and tunable coupling.

Contribution

It presents a novel R-type photoassociative adiabatic passage scheme that reduces laser power requirements and offers tunable atom-molecule coupling for condensate creation.

Findings

Low-power photoassociation achieved

Tunable atom-molecule coupling demonstrated

Enhanced flexibility over magnetic field tuning

Abstract

We propose a scheme of "$R$-type" photoassociative adiabatic passage (PAP) to create polar molecular condensates from two different species of ultracold atoms. Due to the presence of a quasi-coherent population trapping state in the scheme, it is possible to associate atoms into molecules with a \textit{low-power} photoassociation (PA) laser. One remarkable advantage of our scheme is that a tunable atom-molecule coupling strength can be achieved by using a time-dependent PA field, which exhibits larger flexibility than using a tunable magnetic field. In addition, our results show that the PA intensity required in the "$R$-type" PAP could be greatly reduced compared to that in a conventional "$\Lambda $-type" one.