Laser-cooling and Collisions of Ultracold YO Molecules

In this talk, I will describe my work on the direct laser-cooling of molecules, specifically the YO molecule. The work spans over different magneto-optical-trapping mechanisms, sub-Doppler cooling, conservative trapping, and collisional studies. Some of the highlights of my work are the demonstration of the first sub-Doppler molecular MOT, and the study of bulk gas collisions in a true single partial wave regime. In the culmination of this work, we achieve a record phase space density of PSD = 2.5 $\times$ $10^{-5}$ in a bulk dilute gas of YO molecules pushing laser-cooled molecules into the ultracold regime.