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.

arXiv comment4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Quantum computation with trapped polar molecules
• Evidence for Efimov quantum states in an ultracold gas of cesium atoms
• Time-resolved Observation and Control of Superexchange Interactions with Ultracold Atoms in Optical Lattices
• Ultracold dense gas of deeply bound heteronuclear molecules
• Quantum magnetism with multicomponent polar molecules in an optical lattice
• Production of Ultracold, Polar RbCs* Molecules via Photoassociation
• Magnetic trapping and Zeeman relaxation of imidogen (NH X-triplet-Sigma)
• Matter Wave Diffraction from an Inclined Transmission Grating: Searching for the Elusive He-4 Trimer Efimov State
• Magnetic trapping of silver and copper, and anomolous spin relaxation in the Ag-He system
• Buffer gas cooling and trapping of atoms with small magnetic moments

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Cold N+NH Collisions in a Magnetic Trap
• Highly polar molecules consisting of a copper or silver atom interacting with an alkali-metal or alkaline-earth-metal atom
• Formation and dynamics of van der Waals molecules in buffer-gas traps
• Three-body recombination in physical chemistry
• Molecular Collisions: from Near-cold to Ultra-cold
• Cold, anisotropically-interacting van der Waals molecule: TiHe
• On the formation of van der Waals complexes through three-body recombination
• Classical threshold law for the formation of van der Waals molecules
• A fundamental limit to the efficiency of spin-exchange optical pumping of 3He nuclei
• Hyperfine frequencies of 87Rb and 133Cs atoms in Xe gas
• Low-energy collisions between carbon atoms and oxygen molecules in a magnetic trap
• Potential energy curves for the interaction of Ag(5s) and Ag(5p) with noble gas atoms
• Ion-atom-atom three-body recombination in cold hydrogen and deuterium plasmas
• Spin hierarchy in van der Waals molecule formation via ultracold three-body recombination
• Bound-bound transitions in the emission spectra of Ba${}^{+}$--He excimer
• Isotope study of the nonlinear pressure shifts of ${}^{85}$Rb and ${}^{87}$Rb hyperfine resonances in Ar, Kr, and Xe buffer gases
• Spin structure of diatomic van der Waals molecules of alkali atoms