Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold sodium-rubidium molecules with tunable dipolar interactions

2025/08/28 by Shi, Zhaopeng, Huang, Zerong, Deng, Fulin +4 · 6 citations
#Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.20518

Abstract

Realizing Bose-Einstein condensation of polar molecules is a long-standing challenge in ultracold physics and quantum science due to near-universal two-body collisional losses. Here, we report the production of a Bose-Einstein condensate of ground-state sodium-rubidium molecules via high efficiency evaporative cooling, with losses suppressed using the dual microwave shielding technique. The ability to tune the dipolar interaction between these ultracold polar molecules is crucial for producing the condensate and enables exciting prospects for future applications. We explore different regimes of dipolar interactions, realizing both the gas phase and the quantum droplet phase of the molecular condensate. This work opens new avenues for investigating quantum matter with strong dipolar interactions and for quantum simulation of long-range many-body systems.

Citations

• Observation of Self-Bound Droplets of Ultracold Dipolar Molecules
• Extreme Loss Suppression and Wide Tunability of Dipolar Interactions in an Ultracold Molecular Gas
• Universal Bound States with Bose-Fermi Duality in Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecules
• Self-bound monolayer crystals of ultracold polar molecules
• Quantum Phases for Finite-Temperature Gases of Bosonic Polar Molecules Shielded by Dual Microwaves
• Double Microwave Shielding
• Two- and many-body physics of ultracold molecules dressed by dual microwave fields
• Universality in the microwave shielding of ultracold polar molecules
• Observation of a Halo Trimer in an Ultracold Bose-Fermi Mixture
• Dipolar droplets of strongly interacting molecules
• Three-Body Recombination of Ultracold Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecules
• Quantum Computation and Quantum Simulation with Ultracold Molecules
• Scattering of ultracold molecules in the highly resonant regime

Cited by

• From few- to many-body physics: Strongly dipolar molecular Bose-Einstein condensates and quantum fluids
• Generation of strong ultralow-phase-noise microwave fields with tunable ellipticity for ultracold polar molecules
• Interaction-induced Dimension Reduction for Bound States in Microwave-Shielded Ultracold Molecules
• Trap-Quenched Matter-Wave Optics in Space
• Collisional relaxation in shielded dipolar molecular gases
• Exploring molecular supersolidity via exact and mean-field theories: single microwave shielding

Related

• Observation of Self-Bound Droplets of Ultracold Dipolar Molecules
• Phases of a Bose-Einstein condensate of microwave-shielded dipolar molecules
• Extreme Loss Suppression and Wide Tunability of Dipolar Interactions in an Ultracold Molecular Gas
• Dual-species Bose-Einstein condensates of ²³Na and ⁴¹K with tunable interactions
• Double Microwave Shielding