Bose-Einstein Condensation of Dipolar Molecules

Half a century ago, Bill Stwalley described the vision of realizing atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and why this would be an exciting scientific goal. A quarter century ago, he formulated the concept of creating dipolar molecules from ultracold gases of atoms. These visions have independently become a reality and opened two major directions in AMO physics. They have now come together in the form of Bose-Einstein condensates of dipolar molecules.

Recently, we have created the first Bose-Einstein condensate of dipolar molecules [1]. We evaporatively cool a gas of sodium-cesium molecules to below 10 nanokelvin, deep in the quantum degenerate regime. The condensates live for several seconds. This dramatic improvement over previous molecular cooling efforts is enabled by collisional shielding via microwave dressing, suppressing inelastic losses by four orders of magnitude [2]. Microwave dressing also provides an exceptional level of tunability of dipole-dipole interactions, opening the door to novel phases of matter in molecular quantum liquids. Most recently, we have observed self-bound droplets in a gas of strongly dipolar molecules [3].

In this talk, I will describe our experimental approach, discuss recent results, and give an outlook on novel opportunities enabled by molecular Bose-Einstein condensates for many-body quantum physics, quantum simulation, and quantum computing.