Zeeman-Sisyphus Deceleration of Polyatomic Molecules

Recent efforts to laser cool molecules have generally relied upon radiative slowing. This technique has been effective in loading MOTs of molecular species that can efficiently optical cycle; that is, species that can scatter ~10,000 photons. A method that uses many fewer photon scatters would enable slowing of a much larger class of molecules. We present here a Zeeman-Sisyphus (Z-S) slower that uses large magnetic fields and only a few scattered photons. CaOH is slowed and efficiently accumulated at velocities below 10 m/s, while using an average of ~7 scattered photons per molecule. This approach can be applied to essentially any paramagnetic molecule. We also report progress on Z-S slowing YbOH, a species of interest for precision measurement of the permanent electron electric dipole moment.