Scott Nguyen
Harvard University
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
2:00 pm in 38 SPL
Look Mom. No Hands! The Frontier of Cooling and Trapping Atoms and Molecules
Abstract: For the past ten years, our group has been developing the technology and technique that would enable the study of atomic and molecular processes at ultracold temperatures, showing that buffer gas loading is a viable alternative to laser cooling with the primary advantage of being applicable to not only atoms but also molecules. In this talk, I will focus on two recent experiments. In the first, we studied the collision induced Zeeman relaxation rate in CaF and confirmed a metric which can be used to determine which molecules are conducive to magnetic trapping. In the second experiment, we've trapped large numbers of metastable helium and evaporatively cooled them into the ultracold regime. The results of this experiment holds tremendous promise and may prove to be a path to achieving ultracold polar molecules.