Assembly of Ultracold Polar Molecules in Optical Tweezers

Optical tweezers have emerged as a powerful technique for trapping and manipulating single atoms, stimulating many applications, including quantum computing and quantum metrology. Extending this technique to ultracold molecules will unlock new applications leveraging the rich internal structure of molecules and their long-range dipolar interactions.

In this webinar, Simon Cornish will briefly review single-atom trapping in optical tweezers before explaining how individual polar molecules can be assembled from a pair of atoms initially confined in separate tweezers. Simon will show that confining the molecules in magic-wavelength tweezers unlocks their rotational degree of freedom for applications in quantum science and will report high-fidelity entanglement of a pair of molecules using the dipolar interaction.

Subject Matter Level: Intermediate – Assumes basic knowledge of the topic

What You Will Learn:

• Single atom optical trapping
• Assemble of individual polar molecules
• Entanglement of a pair of molecules

Who Should Attend:
Biologists, Physicists, Chemists, and Engineers interested in optical trapping, biotechnology, and quantum science

About the Presenter: Simon Cornish from Durham University, Department of Physics

Professor Simon Cornish Read Physics at Keble College, Oxford, graduating with first-class honors in 1994. He remained in Oxford at Linacre College for his Ph.D on laser spectroscopy of muonium with Patrick Baird and Pat Sandars. He was then awarded a Lindemann Fellowship and moved to Boulder, Colorado, to work with Carl Wieman at JILA on Bose-Einstein condensation. He returned to Oxford in 2001 as a postdoctoral researcher with Chris Foot and secured a Junior Research Fellowship at Brasenose College. In 2002, he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which he transferred to Durham in 2004. He was promoted to Reader in 2008 and Full Professor in 2013.