Overview

This comprehensive experimental and theoretical program addresses the production and characterization of cold and ultracold polar molecules, and a variety of scientific explorations using these systems. The scientific goals range from the study and control of collisional and chemical processes at low temperatures, to the engineering of many-body quantum systems with novel interactions, to the development of new technologies for quantum in- formation processing, precision measurement, sensing, etc. A diversity of methods will be necessary to exploit the full host of scientific opportunities. Our experimental approaches to produce cold polar molecules include assembly from ultracold atoms using magneto- and photo-association, evaporative and sympathetic cooling, buffer gas cooling, Stark deceler- ation, laser cooling, ion trapping, and combinations thereof. New, sensitive methods for detecting and characterizing cold molecular systems will be developed. Experiments will be conducted with both neutral and ionized polar molecules; both molecular beams and a variety of different trapping techniques (ion traps, electric traps, magnetic traps, optical traps, chip-based traps) will be employed. Precision spectroscopy will be used to enable optimized production and cooling schemes, and as development towards new types of pre- cision measurement and sensing applications. Theoretical efforts will be tightly integrated with the experimental work on spectroscopy and collisional effects, to both interpret data and guide new directions. In parallel, parts of our team will devise forward-looking schemes for employing polar molecules in quanutm many-body systems, quantum information pro- cessing, etc.