Ultracold field-linked tetratomic molecules.

Abstract

Ultracold polyatomic molecules offer opportunities¹ in cold chemistry^2,3, precision measurements⁴ and quantum information processing^5,6, because of their rich internal structure. However, their increased complexity compared with diatomic molecules presents a challenge in using conventional cooling techniques. Here we demonstrate an approach to create weakly bound ultracold polyatomic molecules by electroassociation⁷ (F.D. et al., manuscript in preparation) in a degenerate Fermi gas of microwave-dressed polar molecules through a field-linked resonance^8-11. Starting from ground-state NaK molecules, we create around 1.1 × 10³ weakly bound tetratomic (NaK)₂ molecules, with a phase space density of 0.040(3) at a temperature of 134(3) nK, more than 3,000 times colder than previously realized tetratomic molecules¹². We observe a maximum tetramer lifetime of 8(2) ms in free space without a notable change in the presence of an optical dipole trap, indicating that these tetramers are collisionally stable. Moreover, we directly image the dissociated tetramers through microwave-field modulation to probe the anisotropy of their wavefunction in momentum space. Our result demonstrates a universal tool for assembling weakly bound ultracold polyatomic molecules from smaller polar molecules, which is a crucial step towards Bose-Einstein condensation of polyatomic molecules and towards a new crossover from a dipolar Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid^13-15 to a Bose-Einstein condensation of tetramers. Moreover, the long-lived field-linked state provides an ideal starting point for deterministic optical transfer to deeply bound tetramer states^16-18.