Optically Trapped SrOH for Dark Matter Searches
ORAL
Abstract
Laser-coolable polyatomic molecules containing heavy nuclei are a promising platform for probes of fundamental physics, e.g. searches for temporal variation of fundamental constants. Their advantages over simpler systems stem from structural complexity. However, these structures also make laser cooling and trapping the molecules difficult. To date, only one other polyatomic molecule, CaOH, has been laser-cooled and trapped in a magneto-optical trap (MOT). SrOH, which has many of the same characteristics that made it possible to laser-cool CaOH (1, 2) has much greater sensitivity to physics beyond the Standard Model. We report sub-doppler cooling, a conveyor-belt MOT, and optical-dipole trap (ODT) of SrOH containing > 10^3 molecules (3). Additionally, we discuss results including high resolution spectroscopy of additional vibrational repumping transitions (4), as well as increasing trapped molecule numbers using 2D transverse cooling.
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Publication: 1: Precision Measurement of Time-Reversal Symmetry Violation with Laser-Cooled Polyatomic Molecules, Kozyryev et al., PRL, 2017
2: Vibrational branching fractions for laser cooling of nonlinear strontium-containing molecules, Lasner et al., PRA, 2022
3: Optical Trapping of SrOH Molecules for Dark Matter and T-violation Searches, Sawaoka et al., PRR, 2026
4: High-sensitivity molecular spectroscopy of SrOH using magneto-optical trapping, Lunstad et al., ArXiv, 2025
Presenters
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Abdullah Nasir
- Harvard University