Towards photon recoil spectroscopy of complex molecular ions

by Prof. Michael Drewsen (Aarhus University)

Thursday 10 Jul 2025, 16:15 → 17:30 Europe/Berlin

ENC-D114 (ENC)

Trapped, single complex molecular ions have in the past been demonstrated to be sympathetically cooled translationally to near the Doppler laser cooling limit through the Coulomb interaction with laser cooled and co-trapped single atomic ions [1]. Furthermore, simpler molecular ions have been sympathetically cooled of to near their motional ground state through resolved sideband cooling of the atomic ions [2,3], and their internal state have been prepared either by buffer gas cooling [4] or probabilistic state detection [5-7].

In the talk, I will discuss, our efforts to extend ground state cooling of complex molecular ions with photon recoil spectroscopy in both the sideband unresolved [8] and resolved regime [9] with the aim - among others - of measuring the chirality of single molecules through a photon recoil spectroscopy version of the schemes presented in in Ref. [10]. Finally, to illustrate the very diverse potential of recoil spectroscopy, an example of how to test for potential extensions to quantum mechanics with charged macromolecules [11] will briefly be discussed.

 

[1] K. Højbjerre et al., Phys. Rev. A 77, 030702(R) (2008).
[2] G. Poulsen, PhD thesis, Aarhus University, 2011.
[3] R. Rugango et al., New J. Phys. 17, 035009 (2015).
[4] K. Hansen et al., Nature 508, 76 (2014).
[5] Wolf, F. et al., Nature 530, 457 (2016).
[6] C.-W. Chou et al., Nature 545, 203 (2017).
[7] M. Sinhal et al., Science 367, 1213 (2020).
[8] E. H. Clausen et al., Phys. Rev. A 105, 063709 (2022).
[9] P. O.Schmidt et al., Science 309, 749 (2005).
[10] N. V. Vitanov and M. Drewsen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 173202 (2019).
[11] E. Lenler-Eriksen, M. Drewsen and M. Carlesso, New J. Phys. 26 113008 (2024).