Extreme Loss Suppression and Wide Tunability of Dipolar Interactions in an Ultracold Molecular Gas

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a stable ultracold molecular gas with suppressed inelastic losses and wide tunability of dipolar interactions, enabling new explorations of strongly dipolar quantum states.

Contribution

It introduces a method using double microwave dressing to greatly suppress inelastic losses in ultracold molecules and achieve wide-range dipolar tunability.

Findings

Molecular gas with several seconds lifetime achieved.

Inelastic loss suppression factors exceed 10,000 for two-body and 1,000 for three-body processes.

Dipolar length tunable from 0 to 1 μm, covering a broad interaction range.

Abstract

Ultracold dipolar molecules hold great promise for the creation of novel quantum states of matter, but the realization of long-lived molecular bulk samples with strong dipole-dipole interactions has remained elusive. Here, we realize a collisionally stable gas of ultracold ground state molecules with a lifetime of several seconds. Utilizing double microwave dressing, we achieve an extreme suppression of inelastic two- and three-body losses by factors of more than 10,000 and 1,000, respectively. We find that losses remain suppressed across a wide range of dipole-dipole interactions, allowing the continuous tuning of the dipolar length from 0 to 1 um $\sim$ 20,000 $a_0$. Combined with the recent realization of Bose-Einstein condensation of dipolar molecules, our findings open the door to the exploration of strongly dipolar quantum liquids.