Efficient production of polar molecular Bose–Einstein condensates via an all-optical R-type atom–molecule adiabatic passage

Abstract

We propose a scheme of ‘R-type’ photoassociative adiabatic passage (PAP) to create polar molecular condensates from two different species of ultracold atoms. Due to the presence of a quasi-coherent population trapping state in the scheme, it is possible to associate atoms into molecules with a low-power photoassociation (PA) laser. One remarkable advantage of our scheme is that a tunable atom–molecule coupling strength can be achieved by using a time-dependent PA field, which exhibits larger flexibility than using a tunable magnetic field. In addition, our results show that the PA intensity required in the ‘R-type’ PAP could be greatly reduced compared to that in a conventional ‘Λ-type’ one.