Building Single Molecules in Optical Tweezers

Ultracold polar molecules are sought-after for a range of new possibilities from studying ultracold chemical reactions to building quantum simulators and computers. My group develops techniques to assemble single molecules atom-by-atom with full internal and motional state control. Starting with ground-state cooled single atoms, we magneto-associate a single NaCs molecule near a newly identified s-wave Feshbach resonance. Furthermore, by preparing a constituent atom with one motional excitation, we produce a p-wave Feshbach molecule. With an additional Raman transfer step of molecules from Feshbach state to the rovibronic ground state, we foresee these single molecules as valuable resources for quantum simulation and quantum computation due to their rich internal degrees of freedom and strong tunable inter-molecular coupling.