Vibrational Cooling of Photoassociated Homonuclear Cold Molecules

In this work, we produce vibrationally cold homonuclear Rb molecules using spontaneous optical pumping. The vibrationally cooled molecules are produced in three steps. In the first step, we use a photoassociation laser to produce molecules in high vibrational levels of the singlet ground state. Then in a second step, a 50 W broadband laser at 1071 nm, which bandwidth is about 2 nm, is used to transfer the molecules to lower vibrational levels via optical pumping through the excited state. This process transfers the molecules from vibrational levels around $\nu \simeq $113 to a distribution of levels below $\nu =$35. The molecules can be further cooled using a broadband light source near 685 nm. In order to obtain such broadband source, we have used a 5mW superluminescent diode, which is amplified in a tapered amplifier using a double pass configuration. After the amplification, the spectrum is properly shaped and we end up with about 90 mW distributed in the 682 -689 nm range. The final vibrational distribution is probed using resonance-enhanced multiphoton ionization with a pulsed dye laser near 670 nm operating at 4KHz. The results are presented and compared with theoretical simulations. This work was supported by Fapesp and INCT-IQ.