" Production of Cold Molecules by Extraction From a Thermal Source"

Laser cooling and trapping has revolutionalized many areas of atomic physics.  However, relatively few atomic species can be easily laser cooled due to the requirement of a simplified internal structure to prevent optical pumping into dark states.  The creation of sources of cold molecules promises not only to bring the ultracold revolution to molecular physics, but the complexities of molecular systems can add new dimensions to current ultracold studies.  I will present our work on producing cold samples of nitric oxide.  Instead of direct cooling, the cold fraction is extracted from a thermal gas using dc electric fields to deflect the slow moving particles from an effusive molecular beam.  We measure the temperature of the output of the source by long-lived Rydberg state time-of-flight spectroscopy.