Molecules near absolute zero and external field control of atomic and molecular dynamics

Cold collisions catalyse conformational conversion

“…Also, it is interesting to note that there presently is a large activity in the field of cold collisions. 34 Here we have demonstrated a potentially very important application of cold collisions, namely the use of cold collisions in the preparation of selected conformations of gas-phase molecules.…”

Formation of ultracold LiCs molecules

“…At ultralow temperatures the interaction energy of polar molecules in an electric field can largely exceed their thermal energy. Hence processes such as elastic and inelastic collisions can be manipulated by applying electric fields [1,2,3,4]. On the one hand, an array of cold polar molecules has been proposed to represent a quantum computation device, where each qubit is defined by the orientation of a molecular dipole relative to an external electric field [5].…”

“…On the one hand, an array of cold polar molecules has been proposed to represent a quantum computation device, where each qubit is defined by the orientation of a molecular dipole relative to an external electric field [5]. On the other hand, chemical reactions of polar molecules at vanishing thermal energy have been proposed to be controllable by suitable external electromagnetic fields [4,6]. Despite the existence of potential energy barriers, such reactions feature significant rate coefficients at low temperatures in the Wigner threshold regime [7,8].…”

Cold polar molecules in two-dimensional traps: Tailoring interactions with external fields for novel quantum phases

“…In the many body Hamiltonian for a dilute quantum gas this gives rise to an effective two-body short range interaction in the form of a contact interaction with a scattering length a s . Polar molecules have strong permanent electric dipole moments in their electronic-vibrational ground state manifold, and pairs of molecules aligned by external DC or AC electric fields will interact via (comparatively strong) dipole-dipole interactions with char-acteristic long-range 1/r 3 dependence [2,31,32,33,34]. These dipole-dipole interactions will be attractive or repulsive, depending on the relative orientation of the dipoles.…”