Data-insensitive cooling of polar molecules with Rydberg atoms

We propose a method to sympathetically cool polar molecules with Rydberg atoms without destroying the quantum information encoded in the polar molecules. While the interactions between the two are usually state-dependent, we show how to engineer state-insensitive interactions between the hot molecules and the cold atoms with a suitable choice of internal states and the application of external fields. The resulting interactions, which may be van der Waals or dipolar, induce a phonon swap interaction between the two species, thereby coherently cooling the polar molecules without affecting the internal state, a process which can be repeated if the atoms are cooled again or new cold atoms are brought in. Our cooling schemes open the possibility of extending quantum computation and simulation times in emerging hybrid tweezer arrays of polar molecules and neutral atoms.