Data-insensitive cooling of polar molecules with Rydberg atoms

Understand

We propose a method to sympathetically cool polar molecules with Rydberg atoms without destroying the quantum information encoded in the polar molecules.

• While the interactions between the two are usually state-dependent, we show how to engineer state-insensitive interactions between the hot molecules and the cold atoms with a suitable choice of internal states and the application of external fields.
• The resulting interactions, which may be van der Waals or dipolar, induce a phonon swap interaction between the two species, thereby coherently cooling the polar molecules without affecting the internal state, a process which can be repeated if the atoms are cooled again or new cold atoms are brought in.
• Our cooling schemes open the possibility of extending quantum computation and simulation times in emerging hybrid tweezer arrays of polar molecules and neutral atoms.