We report our spectroscopic studies of the d 3Π state of ultra-cold 7Li85Rb using resonantly enhanced multi-photon ionization and depletion spectroscopy with bound-to-bound transitions originating from the metastable a 3Σ+ state. We evaluate the potential of this state for use as the intermediate state in a stimulated-Raman-adiabatic-passage transfer scheme from triplet Feshbach LiRb molecules to the X 1Σ+ ground state and find that the lowest several vibrational levels possess the requisite overlap with initial and final states, as well as convenient energies. Using depletion measurements, we measured the well depth and spin-orbit splitting. We suggest possible pathways for short-range photoassociation using deeply bound vibrational levels of this electronic state.
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Because photoassociation followed by spontaneous decay to form molecules is a two photon process and selection rules dictate that parity needs to change for each transition, the ground state and the scattering state need to have the same parity.
