Modeling the adiabatic creation of ultracold, polar $\mathrm{^{23}Na^{40}K}$ molecules

TL;DR

This paper models and experimentally demonstrates the adiabatic creation of ultracold polar $ ext{^{23}Na}^{40} ext{K}$ molecules via STIRAP, achieving high transfer efficiency and producing a significant number of ground-state molecules.

Contribution

It provides a detailed quantitative model for STIRAP in complex molecules, incorporating internal structure and laser noise, validated by experimental results.

Findings

Produced 5000 ground-state molecules

Achieved induced dipole moments up to 0.54 Debye

Model accurately predicts experimental outcomes

Abstract

In this work we model and realize stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) in the diatomic $\mathrm{^{23}Na^{40}K}$ molecule from weakly bound Feshbach molecules to the rovibronic ground state via the $\left|v_d=5,J=\Omega=1\right\rangle$ excited state in the $d^3\Pi$ electronic potential. We demonstrate how to set up a quantitative model for polar molecule production by taking into account the rich internal structure of the molecules and the coupling laser phase noise. We find excellent agreement between the model predictions and the experiment, demonstrating the applicability of the model in the search of an ideal STIRAP transfer path. In total we produce 5000 fermionic groundstate molecules. The typical phase-space density of the sample is 0.03 and induced dipole moments of up to 0.54 Debye could be observed.