Progress towards creating and manipulating ultracold LiRb molecules

We present our progress towards creating ultracold LiRb molecules from a dual species magneto-optical trap (MOT) of $^{7}$Li and $^{85}$Rb. We suggest photoassociation (PA) pathways for efficient production of ultracold LiRb molecules based on our recent experimental work on spectroscopy of LiRb molecules (S. Dutta et al., Chem. Phys. Lett. 511, 7 (2011)). We discuss a scheme based on interference of optical transitions to create ultracold molecules in a superposition of rotational states, and their manipulation based on an optical-phase based coherent control technique. We describe our apparatus where ultracold LiRb molecules will be created using PA, oriented using optical-phase based coherent control, and then detected using multiphoton ionization. We also discuss the ability of our apparatus to image the orientation of such molecules.