Introduction

There have been enormous recent advances in our ability to produce and trap samples of translationally cold molecules (below 1 K) and ultracold molecules (below 1 mK). Molecules such as NH3, OH and NH have been cooled from room temperature to the milliKelvin regime by a variety of methods including buffer-gas cooling and Stark deceleration. Molecules have also been produced in ultracold atomic gases by photoassociation and magnetoassociation of pairs of atoms. Bose-Einstein condensates have been produced for dimers of both bosonic and fermionic alkali metal atoms, and the first signatures of ultracold triatomic and tetraatomic molecules have been observed. 

The new capabilities open up many exciting prospects, including: 

• The study of collision processes in unprecedented detail using cooled or velocity-controlled species
• The use of cold molecules in high-precision measurement to observe fundamentally important quantities
• The production of quantum gases of dipolar molecules, which would exhibit many new properties
• The use of cold molecules as qubits in quantum computing 
• Controlled ultracold chemistry, in which controlled chemical changes are achieved coherently for large samples using external fields.  

Aims

Faraday Discussion 142 was organised by the Faraday Division. The meeting focussed on the challenges listed in the themes section on this page. Topics covered will include both cooling of molecules from high temperatures and formation of molecules in ultracold atomic gases; molecules in cold ionic gases and in helium droplets were also included.

Themes

The following themes were included in the discussion:

• Magnetoassociation to form ultracold molecules
• Photoassociation to form ultracold molecules 
• Methods for cooling molecules 
• Collisions of cold molecules 
• Control and manipulation of ultracold molecules 
• Applications of cold molecules 
• Molecules in lattices 

Scientific Committee

Professor Jeremy M Hutson 
Durham University, UK (chair)

Professor Ed Hinds 
Imperial College London, UK

Professor Tim Softley
University of Oxford, UK

Professor Gerard Meijer 
Fritz-Haber-Institut, Berlin, Germany

Professor Rudolf Grimm
University of Innsbruck, Austria

Professor William Stwalley
University of Connecticut, USA

Co-sponsor

We would like to thank the Molecular Physics Group and  the QQQ Group of the Institute of Physics (IOP) for their co-sponsorship support of this Faraday Discussion.

Sponsors

We are grateful to the IOP Molecular Physics Group and CCP6 Molecular Quantum Dynamics for their generous sponsorship support of this Faraday Discussion.