Dipolar Collisions of Ultracold Ground-State Bosonic Molecules

Abstract

The dipolar collision between ultracold polar molecules is an important topic both by its own right from the fundamental point of view and for the successful exploration of many-body physics with strong and long-range dipolar interactions. Here, we report the investigation of collisions between ultracold ground-state sodium-rubidium molecules in electric fields with induced electric dipole moments as large as 0.7 D. We observe a step-wise enhancement of losses due to the coupling between different partial waves induced by the increasingly stronger anisotropic dipolar interactions. Varying the temperature of our sample, we find good agreement with theoretical loss rates assuming complex formation as the main loss process. Our results shed new light on the understanding of complex molecular collisions in the presence of strong dipolar interactions and also demonstrate the versatility of modifying molecular interactions with electric fields. * Present address: 5. Physikalisches

Loss of Ultracold Rb87Cs133 Molecules via Optical Excitation of Long-Lived Two-Body Collision Complexes

“…However, in their proposal, the complex lifetimes are predicted to be sufficiently long that a further collision with a third molecule is possible, leading to loss of all three molecules from the trap [48]. Crucially, if the formation of collision complexes is the rate-limiting step, then the loss would appear to be two-body in nature, consistent with experimental observations [43][44][45][46].…”

Photoinduced Two-Body Loss of Ultracold Molecules

“…Rb 133 Cs [15,16], 23 Na 87 Rb [17], and the fermionic 23 Na 40 K [18,19]. However, losses were still observed at about the same rate that would be expected of reactive molecules [20][21][22]. In all of these experiments, the lifetime of the gas in the crossed optical dipole trap was limited to a few seconds [18] or less [15][16][17].…”

Dipolar exchange quantum logic gate with polar molecules

“… 33 , 34 In this manuscript, we use 23 Na 133 Cs as an example because it has a large permanent electric dipole moment (4.6 Debye), and full quantum control of individually trapped molecules is being developed. 35 , 36 A similar gate scheme that makes use of internal molecular couplings could also be applied to other ultracold polar molecules, including other bialkalis where a single internal quantum state can already be prepared 34 , 37 – 40 and molecules of 2 Σ electronic structure with spin-rotational coupling. 41 – 44 …”