It has been roughly three decades since laser cooling techniques produced ultracold atoms, leading to rapid advances in a wide array of fields. Until recently, laser cooling had not been extended to molecules because of their complex internal structure, which precludes the realization of a true optical cycling transition. However, this complexity makes molecules potentially useful for a wide range of applications. For example, heteronuclear molecules possess permanent electric dipole moments that lead to long-range, tunable, anisotropic dipole–dipole interactions.
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