Ultracold ground-state dipolar ${}^{40}\mathrm{K}$${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ molecules recently have been produced in a loose harmonic trap by employing a magnetic field sweep across a Feshbach resonance followed by stimulated Raman adiabatic passage [K.-K. Ni et al., Science 322, 231 (2008)]. The overall experimental efficiency for molecule formation was around $20\%$. We show that the efficiency can be increased to nearly $100\%$ if one first loads the atomic gases into an optical lattice of the appropriate depth and tunes the interspecies attraction to have exactly one atom of each species at an occupied lattice site. Our proposed scheme provides a large enhancement to the dipolar molecule density, even at relatively high temperatures, and avoids three-body recombination loss by preventing lattice sites from being triply occupied.

• Received 12 August 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.81.011605