Extreme loss suppression in an ultracold molecular gas with widely tunable dipolar interactions

Ultracold dipolar molecules hold great promise for the creation of exotic quantum states of matter, but the realization of long-lived molecular bulk samples with strong dipole-dipole interactions has remained challenging. In this work, we realized a collisionally stable gas of ultracold ground state molecules with a lifetime of several seconds. Utilizing double-microwave dressing, we achieved an extreme suppression of inelastic two- and three-body losses by factors of more than 10,000 and 1000, respectively. We found that losses remained suppressed across a wide range of dipole-dipole interactions, allowing the continuous tuning of the dipolar length from −21,000 to 12,000 a 0 , where a 0 is the Bohr radius. Combined with the recent realization of Bose-Einstein condensation of dipolar molecules, our findings open the door to the exploration of strongly dipolar quantum liquids.

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Publication Details

Journal
Science
Published
2026-09-17
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adz0521
Primary Topic
Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Extreme loss suppression in an ultracold molecular gas with widely tunable dipolar interactions

Niccolò Bigagli, Weijun Yuan, Claire Warner, Ian Stevenson et al.
Science
Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates
article

Extreme loss suppression in an ultracold molecular gas with widely tunable dipolar interactions

Niccolò Bigagli, Weijun Yuan, Claire Warner, Ian Stevenson, Sebastian Will, Haneul Kwak, Tijs Karman, Siwei Zhang
article en

Abstract

Ultracold dipolar molecules hold great promise for the creation of exotic quantum states of matter, but the realization of long-lived molecular bulk samples with strong dipole-dipole interactions has remained challenging. In this work, we realized a collisionally stable gas of ultracold ground state molecules with a lifetime of several seconds. Utilizing double-microwave dressing, we achieved an extreme suppression of inelastic two- and three-body losses by factors of more than 10,000 and 1000, respectively. We found that losses remained suppressed across a wide range of dipole-dipole interactions, allowing the continuous tuning of the dipolar length from −21,000 to 12,000 a 0 , where a 0 is the Bohr radius. Combined with the recent realization of Bose-Einstein condensation of dipolar molecules, our findings open the door to the exploration of strongly dipolar quantum liquids.

ScienceVol. 393(6817)
Radboud University Nijmegen (NL), Columbia University (US)
National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences
Openalex Percentile: Top 13%
Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates
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Extreme loss suppression in an ultracold molecular gas with widely tunable dipolar interactions — Niccolò Bigagli, Weijun Yuan, et al. · Science (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS