Laser-Cooling and Trapping of CaF in a Dynamical Repulsive Optical Trap

In this talk, we present results on trapping and laser-cooling of CaF molecules in a dynamically tunable repulsive ring-shaped optical trap. We characterize the dependencies of molecular loss rates on temperature and trap barrier height and find strongly suppressed off-resonant photon scattering, indicating suppressed AC Stark shifts within the ring trap. In addition, we explore in-trap Λ-cooling and find it to be as effective as that in free space. By combining in-trap laser cooing with dynamical compression of the trap, we demonstrate rapid and efficient transfer from a MOT into a conventional attractive optical trap.  This method to enhance transfer efficiencies could be applicable to a wide class of molecules, and could be used to increase the loading probabilities of molecular optical tweezer arrays.