Lithium as a refrigerant for polar molecules

Gases of ultracold polar molecules offer exciting new possibilities in many areas, including precision measurements [1], simulations of many-body quantum systems [2], and quantum information processing [3]. We aim to cool polar molecules by sympathetic cooling with ultracold atoms inside a suitable trap [4]. This poster presents our work on the production and transportation of a dense ultracold cloud of lithium for use as a refrigerant in sympathetic cooling. Up to $10^{10}$ lithium atoms are loaded from a Zeeman slower into a magneto-optical trap. Using a moving magnetic trap the atoms are transported to a separate chamber where they will later be co-trapped with molecules. We present the design of our setup and our recent results on transport. We also explore the possibility of electrically polarizing the lithium so that dipole-dipole interactions become important in the gas.\\[4pt] [1] J. J. Hudson, D. M. Kara, I. J. Smallman, B. E. Sauer, M. R. Tarbutt and E. A. Hinds, Nature 473, 493 (2011).\\[0pt] [2] A. Micheli, G. K. Brennen, and P. Zoller, Nature Physics 2, 341 (2006).\\[0pt] [3] D. DeMille, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 067901 (2002).\\[0pt] [4] S. K. Tokunaga, W. Skomorowski, P. S. \.{Z}uchowski, R. Moszynski, J. M. Hutson, E. A. Hinds and M. R. Tarbutt, Eur. Phys. J. D 65, 141 (2011).