“Cooling the hydrogen atom without actually cooling it”
Abstract: Recent progress in laser cooling atoms and molecules have brought increasingly complex molecular systems into the ultracold regime. This has enabled new opportunities in studying quantum many-body phenomena and exploring the limits of fundamental physics. The hydrogen atom still remains the holy grail of AMO physics because of its simplicity. It is the smallest atom composed of only one proton and electron and this allows for theoretical calculations with unprecedented precision. However, laser cooling the hydrogen atom has eluded physicists for decades due to its light mass and the large recoil of the photon. In this talk, I will describe how we are attempting to circumvent the difficulty of cooling the atom by cooling instead the diatomic hydride molecule - CaH. I will summarize the exciting recent developments in the field of AMO physics that have made it possible to cool CaH and show how we plan on achieving the goal of an ultracold and trapped gas of hydrogen atoms.