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Abstract

A detailed treatment of an electro-optical trap for polar molecules, realized by embedding an optical trap within a uniform electrostatic field, is presented and the trap’s properties analyzed and discussed. The electro- optical trap offers significant advantages over an optical trap that include an increased trap depth and conversion of alignment of the trapped molecules to marked orientation. Tilting the polarization plane of the optical field with respect to the electrostatic field diminishes both the trap depth and orientation and lifts the degeneracy of the ±M states of the trapped molecules. These and other features of the electro-optical trap are examined in terms of the eigenproperties of the polar and polarizable molecules subject to the combined permanent and induced electric dipole interactions at play.