Towards Strongly Correlated 2D Systems of Ultracold Dipolar Sodium-Cesium Molecules

Dipolar many-body quantum systems offer an exciting pathway to realizing novel quantum phases. Specifically, in two dimensions, predictions include the formation of supersolid and hexatic phases, as well as dipolar quantum crystals. Our goal is to pursue this physics with quantum gases of ultracold dipolar sodium-cesium molecules, created via atom-by-atom assembly from ultracold mixtures of sodium and cesium atoms. In their absolute internal ground state, sodium-cesium molecules feature a large electric dipole moment of 4.6 Debye, which leads to highly controllable long-range interactions. In this talk, we report on the production of overlapping Bose-Einstein condensates of 2 x 10⁵ sodium atoms and 2 x 10⁴ cesium atoms, the exploration of Feshbach resonances in this novel quantum gas mixture, and our pathway to prepare NaCs molecules in their absolute ground state for the study of many-body physics in two dimensions.
* This work is supported by the Sloan Foundation, the Wu Foundation, an NSF CAREER award, and an NSERC graduate fellowship.