Research

We use laser cooling to bring atoms and molecules to ultracold temperatures, where they can be used to study fundamental quantum science and to realize novel technological applications.

Laser cooling is a very well established technique for atoms, which is used extensively in many labs around the world. It relies on the fact that atoms can repeatedly absorb and emit a large number of photons with the same wavelength. Intuitively, it seems very challenging to also apply this technique to molecules because of their complex level structure, which e.g. includes many rotational and vibrational levels. However, by carefully choosing suitable transitions laser cooling can still be realized for many molecular species.