A team of physicists at the Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau has produced pure trilobite molecules in rubidium over a wide range of frequencies and characterize their binding energies, lifetimes, and dipole moments.
“Creating controllable molecules at ultralow temperatures offers a pathway to engineered ultracold quantum chemical reactions and tests of fundamental physics and symmetries,” said senior author Professor Herwig Ott and colleagues.
“Molecules that possess sizeable electric dipole moments can be controlled by external electric fields making them candidates for quantum information processing and the production of strongly correlated many-body systems.”
“For dipolar molecules with multiple vibrational states electric field pulses have been proposed to create superposition states and observe coherent wave-packet dynamics.”
“Ultralong-range Rydberg molecules are a platform for creating such dipolar molecules in ultracold environments.”
For their experiment, the physicists used a cloud of rubidium atoms that was cooled down in an ultra-high vacuum to about 100 microkelvin (0.0001 degrees above absolute zero).
Subsequently, they excited some of these atoms into a Rydberg state using lasers.
“In this process, the outermost electron in each case is brought into far-away orbits around the atomic body,” Professor Ott said.
“The orbital radius of the electron can be more than one micrometer, making the electron cloud larger than a small bacterium.”
“Such highly excited atoms are also formed in interstellar space and are chemically extremely reactive.”
“If a ground state atom is now located within this giant Rydberg atom, a molecule is formed.”
“While standard chemical bonds are either of covalent, ionic, metallic or dipolar nature, the trilobite molecules are bound by a completely different mechanism.”
“It is the quantum mechanical scattering of the Rydberg electron from the ground…
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