Vibrational stabilization of ultracold KRb molecules: A comparative study

The transfer of weakly bound KRb molecules from levels just below the dissociation threshold into the vibrational ground state with shaped laser pulses is studied. Optimal control theory is employed to calculate the pulses. The complexity of modeling the molecular structure is successively increased in order to study the effects of the long-range behavior of the excited-state potential, resonant spin-orbit coupling, and singlet-triplet mixing.