Ultracold Quantum Mixtures of Silver and Caesium and the Creation of Dipolar CsAg Molecules

Ultracold polar molecules have many applications including in the fields of quantum computation and quantum simulation.

Diatomic molecules containing silver and an alkali atom in particular are of great interest as they possess very large dipole moments, much larger than is available in current experiments. To produce these molecules, they must be associated from a pre-cooled ultracold mixture of atoms. In this project, We will build an experimental apparatus to study mixtures of silver and alkali atoms.

We will examine the collisional properties of the ultracold mixture and how the collisions can be tuned with, for example, magnetic fields. We will aim to associate pairs of atoms to form molecules and transfer these molecules to their internal ground state.

The production of Ag-based molecules in these experiments will enable new studies of many-body quantum phenomena, and may have applications in the field of precision measurements.