Cold Molecules Info

Cooling molecules has been an important field for about half a century since it gives the possibility to study the low energy structure and dynamics of even large species.

Various techniques like supersonic beam expansion and the doping of cold inert matrices were developed and sucessfully applied to molecular studies. Unfortunately, the temperatures reached by these methods have a lower limit on the order of one Kelvin. Recently, new approaches have opened the unexplored subkelvin and submillikelvin domains. Cooling below 1 K has been achieved for several molecular species and temperatures below 1mK have been reached for several alkali dimers.