Ultracold polar molecules: an emerging tool for quantum science

Ultracold atomic gases have enabled remarkable breakthroughs in areas as diverse as precision measurements, quantum few- and many-body physics, and quantum information science. Over the past decade, it has increasingly become possible to create ultracold gases of simple polar molecules, and to manipulate and measure them with the powerful methods of atomic physics. Polar molecules have several key features that are quantitatively different from those of atoms, and these features promise to enable a similarly broad range of scientific advances. For example, the large polarizability of molecules makes them orders of magnitude more sensitive than atoms to tiny perturbations such as those due to CP-violating particle electric dipole moments. In addition, because electric dipole-dipole interactions between molecules are much stronger and longer range than the van der Waals interactions between atoms, molecular quantum gases can form new types of strongly-correlated quantum many body systems. I will describe recent progress in this field and highlight exciting prospects for the near future.

Speaker: David Paul DeMille, University of Chicago

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