Faraday Discussion 142: Cold and Ultracold Molecules

Topics: Physical Chemistry

Date: /15/16/17/ September 2008, Durham, United Kingdom, Europe

Web Site, Contact: middletona@rsc.org (Amanda Middleton)

  

Official Information:

There have been enormous recent advances in our ability to produce and trap samples of translationally cold molecules (below 1 K) and ultracold molecules (below 1 mK).

Molecules such as NH₃, OH and NH have been cooled from room temperature to the milliKelvin regime by a variety of methods including buffer-gas cooling and Stark deceleration.

Molecules have also been produced in ultracold atomic gases by photoassociation and magnetoassociation of pairs of atoms. Bose-Einstein condensates have been produced for dimers of both bosonic and fermionic alkali metal atoms, and the first signatures of ultracold triatomic and tetraatomic molecules have been observed.