Cooling molecules in optical cavities

We have studied theoretically and numerically the cooling of CN molecules in a high-finesse optical cavity and show that these molecules can be cooled from 100 mK temperatures to submillikelvin temperatures in less than 1 ms. We establish that the cooling time does not change significantly with molecular numbers and initial temperatures over a wide range. We have further studied the scaling of the system for extending the current results for hundreds of molecules to a very large molecular ensemble. The results indicate that a gas of 109 molecules can be cooled in the cavity by use of a far-off-resonant and high-intensity pump source. © 2007 The American Physical Society.