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Photon spin molasses for laser cooling molecular rotation

Laser cooling of translational motion of small molecules is performed by addressing transitions that ensure spontaneous emission cannot cause net rotational excitation. This will not be possible once the rotational splitting becomes comparable to the operational excitation linewidth, as will occur for large molecules or wide bandwidth lasers. We show theoretically that in this regime, angular momentum transfer from red-detuned Doppler cooling light can also exert a damping torque on linear molecules, cooling rotation to the same Doppler limit (typically $\approx$ 500 $μ$K for molecules with $\approx$ 10 ns excited-state lifetimes). This cooling process is derived from photon spin, and indicates that standard optical molasses can also cool molecular rotation with no additional experimental resources.