Laser cooling of barium monofluoride molecules

I will report on our progress towards laser cooling of barium monofluoride molecules. Due to its high mass, resolved hyperfine structure in the excited state and branching losses through intermediate states, this molecular species is notoriously difficult to cool, but it shows high promise for various types of precision measurement applications. I will discuss laser cooling strategies for both the bosonic isotopologues, which are interesting for electron EDM searches, and the more complex fermionic isotopologues, which are used for parity violation experiments.