Efficient Creation of Ultracold Ground State $^{6}\textrm{Li}^{40}\textrm{K}$ Polar Molecules

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2310.03300
• Publication Date: 2023-01-01
• Authors: Canming He; Xiaoyu Nie; V. Avalos; Sofia Botsi; Sunil Kumar; Anbang Yang; K. Dieckmann
• Keywords: Chemical polarity

We report the creation of ultracold ground state $^{6}\textrm{Li}^{40}\textrm{K}$ polar molecules with high efficiency. Starting from weakly-bound state, stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is adopted to coherently transfer their singlet ro-vibrational $|\textrm{X}^{1}\Sigma^{+},v=0,J=0>$. By employing a STIRAP pathway and low-phase-noise narrow-linewidth lasers, we observed one-way efficiency 96(4)\,\%. Held in an optical dipole trap, lifetime ground-state measured be 5.0(3)\,ms. The large permanent moment LiK confirmed by applying DC electric field on performing Stark shift spectroscopy state. With recent advances quantum control collisions, our work paves way for exploring many-body physics strongly-interacting molecules.