Prospects for the formation of ultracold polar ground state KCs molecules via an optical process

TL;DR

This paper proposes optical methods to produce ultracold KCs molecules in their ground state, leveraging spectroscopic data and quantum calculations to enable efficient population transfer.

Contribution

It introduces new optical coherent schemes for forming ultracold KCs molecules in their ground state using stimulated Raman adiabatic transfer.

Findings

Proposed multiple optical schemes for molecule formation.

Identified suitable excited states for efficient transfer.

Based on spectroscopic and quantum chemistry data.

Abstract

Heteronuclear alkali-metal dimers represent the class of molecules of choice for creating samples of ultracold molecules exhibiting an intrinsic large permanent electric dipole moment. Among them, the KCs molecule, with a permanent dipole moment of 1.92~Debye still remains to be observed in ultracold conditions. Based on spectroscopic studies available in the literature completed by accurate quantum chemistry calculations, we propose several optical coherent schemes to create ultracold bosonic and fermionic KCs molecules in their absolute rovibrational ground level, starting from a weakly bound level of their electronic ground state manifold. The processes rely on the existence of convenient electronically excited states allowing an efficient stimulated Raman adiabatic transfer of the level population.