Formation of van der Waals molecules in buffer gas cooled magnetic traps

Abstract

We show that a large class of helium-containing cold polar molecules form readily in a cryogenic buffer gas, achieving densities as high as 10^12 cm^-3. We explore the spin relaxation of these molecules in buffer gas loaded magnetic traps, and identify a loss mechanism based on Landau-Zener transitions arising from the anisotropic hyperfine interaction. Our results show that the recently observed strong T^6 thermal dependence of spin change in buffer gas trapped silver (Ag) is accounted for by the formation and spin change of AgHe, thus providing evidence for molecular formation in a buffer gas trap.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Time-resolved Observation and Control of Superexchange Interactions with Ultracold Atoms in Optical Lattices
• Ultracold dense gas of deeply bound heteronuclear molecules
• Magnetic trapping and Zeeman relaxation of imidogen (NH X-triplet-Sigma)

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• Classical threshold law for the formation of van der Waals molecules
• Hyperfine frequencies of 87Rb and 133Cs atoms in Xe gas
• Ion-atom-atom three-body recombination in cold hydrogen and deuterium plasmas
• Isotope study of the nonlinear pressure shifts of ${}^{85}$Rb and ${}^{87}$Rb hyperfine resonances in Ar, Kr, and Xe buffer gases