Microwaves Keep a Gas of Ultracold Molecules Alive for Seconds

Physicists at Columbia University have held a gas of ultracold molecules together for several seconds by using microwaves to suppress the collisions that destroy such gases, according to a paper published Sept. 17, 2026, in Science.

Ultracold molecules that pull on one another at a distance are a promising material for building exotic quantum states of matter, the authors write in Science. Long-lived samples with strong interactions of that kind have remained hard to make, because the molecules are lost when they collide.

The group used double-microwave dressing, in which two microwave fields keep the molecules apart. It cut losses in which a pair of molecules is destroyed at once by a factor of more than 10,000, and losses involving three molecules by more than 1,000. The suppression held across a wide range of interaction strengths, which let the team tune that strength continuously.

Molecules of this kind have recently been cooled into a Bose-Einstein condensate, a state in which a gas behaves as a single quantum wave. Combined with that, the authors write, the work opens the door to exploring strongly dipolar quantum liquids.