"Production and Trapping of Cold Molecules."

As the field of ultra-cold atoms evolves, a great interest in the study of molecular dynamics in the ultra-cold regime has grown.  The complex internal structure of molecules precludes laser cooling and hinders most other direct cooling techniques.  In the past few years several techniques have been deployed to produce cold molecules, however, none of these techniques are widely applicable and only work for select molecules.  We will look at two main approaches; first, starting with a cold atomic sample and building molecules by a Feshbach resonance and/or photo-association.  Secondly, we will look at techniques for cooling molecular beams, specifically, a novel technique that relies on collisional dynamics between atoms and molecules to produce cold samples of molecules.  Further, we will demonstrate that this technique can be generalized to cool both diatomic and polyatomic molecules, and discuss some preliminary results for trapping these molecules.