Creating ground state molecules with optical Feshbach resonances in tight traps

We propose to create ultracold ground state molecules in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate by adiabatic crossing of an optical Feshbach resonance. We envision a scheme where the laser intensity and possibly also frequency are linearly ramped over the resonance. Our calculations for Rb-87 show that for sufficiently tight traps it is possible to avoid spontaneous emission while retaining adiabaticity, and conversion efficiencies of up to 50% can be expected.