The development of methods for coherent manipulation of single isolated molecular ions [1,2,3] has made rapid progress in recent years with exciting applications in the fields of precision spectroscopy, fundamental-physics-theories tests, atomic clocks and quantum-controlled chemistry.
In this talk, I will describe our advances for achieving quantum control over a single N2+ molecular ion. In our experiment, we overlap a molecular beam with a radio-frequency ion trap. We ionize single nitrogen molecules into a specific rotational-vibrational state and subsequently trap them in the ion trap. We use a co-trapped atomic ion (Ca+) for ground-state cooling and for molecular-state detection by entangling the molecular state with the atomic-ion motion via their strong Coulomb interaction. We are developing a narrow quantum-cascade laser to perform mid-infra-red precision spectroscopy on a dipole-forbidden vibrational transition.
While we use N2+ as a prototype molecule our methods can be extended to a general class of diatomic and polyatomic molecules.
[1] F. Wolf et al., Nature 530, 457 (2016).
[2] C. W. Chou et al., Nature 545, 203 (2017).
[3] Z. Meir, G. Hegi, K. Najafian, M. Sinhal and S. Willitsch, Faraday Discussions (2019). DOI:10.1039/C8FD00195B
Fig: Radio-frequency ion trap used in our experiment for the purpose of coherent control of single molecular ions.
Host: Nir Navon (nir.navon@yale.edu)