This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Molecular gases are a new form of artificial quantum matter. However, when these molecules collide, they are often lost extremely rapidly.
Researchers from Radboud University and Columbia University have been able to suppress this collisional loss, paving the way for strongly interacting quantum matter. This new artificial quantum matter allows researchers to study quantum behavior relevant to electrons in real materials. Their results are published in Science.
Quantum gases of molecules are created by cooling to nanokelvin temperatures, only 0.000000001° above absolute zero. Under these conditions, quantum effects dominate, and the molecules behave collectively, forming a Bose-Einstein condensate in which many molecules share the same quantum state. This new artificial quantum matter acts as a controllable model material that allows researchers to study quantum behavior relevant to electrons in real materials.
But unlike electrons in real materials, the molecules in these artificial quantum systems are easily lost when they collide. For ultracold molecules, collisional loss is extremely rapid and occurs in essentially every close encounter. Researcher Tijn Karman said, "By controlling the molecular dipole moments with microwaves, researchers were able to suppress these losses by more than a factor of 10,000.
In fact, the suppression was so great that only an upper bound, set by the single-molecule lifetime, could be measured in the lab of Sebastian Will at Columbia." Reducing collisional loss allows researchers to create denser and more stable molecular gases. At the same time, microwave control induces strong, long-range interactions between molecules. Karman said, "This combination makes it possible to realize stable quantum liquids, where the interaction range is larger than the average distance between molecules.
Such systems provide a new platform for exploring strongly interacting quantum matter that is difficult to achieve with atomic gases." A week earlier, Karman published an article about how he was able to create highly ordered arrays of molecules, almost like molecules in an egg carton. Such ordered molecular arrays could provide a foundation for scaling up experiments with molecules as quantum bits. Weijun Yuan et al, Extreme loss suppression in an ultracold molecular gas with widely tunable dipolar interactions, Science (2026).
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