Production of cold, heavy molecules at rest.

Emerging methods that allow molecules to be cooled, decelerated and trapped are opening fantastic new possibilities for precise measurement and manipulation of quantum matter. At Imperial College London we are working to develop new sources of cold molecules into practical tools and to apply these to important problems in physics and chemistry.In this proposal, we plan to advance the state of the art in production, transport, deceleration and trapping of cold polar molecules. A key element of this programme will be to expand the techniques of cold molecule control so that cold, heavy molecules can be produced in large numbers at rest.The specific development that we propose here is to build a new kind of cold molecule source offering a hundred times higher intensity compared with the current state of the art and delivering molecules at rest, including heavy molecules that could not previously be stopped. This source will cool the molecules by collision with helium buffer gas in a liquid helium cryostat. The cooled molecules will be guided out of the cryostat and then brought to rest by a decelerator that uses switched electric field gradients.These technical developments will lead to major progress in several areas of quantum coherence in molecules. Some examples are (i) the use of molecules to probe new elementary particle physics beyond the standard model, (ii) the study of quantum decoherence and the classical-quantum boundary (iii) ultra-high-resolution molecular spectroscopy using fountains and traps, (iv) the manipulation of polar molecules near surfaces as a quantum readout of solid-state qubits.