Product state control of bi-alkali chemical reactions

Abstract

We consider ultracold, chemically reactive scattering collisions of the diatomic molecules KRb. When two such molecules collide in an ultracold gas, we find that they are energetically forbidden from reacting to form the trimer species K${}_2$Rb or Rb${}_2$K, hence can only react via the bond-swapping reaction 2KRb $\to$ K${}_2$ + Rb${}_2$. Moreover, the tiny energy released in this reaction can in principle be set to zero by applying electric or microwave fields, implying a means of controlling the available reaction channels in a chemical reaction.

4 pages double column, 2 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (7)

• A High Phase-Space-Density Gas of Polar Molecules
• Quantum-State Controlled Chemical Reactions of Ultracold KRb Molecules
• Dipolar collisions of polar molecules in the quantum regime
• Quantum gas of rovibronic ground-state molecules in an optical lattice
• Reactions of ultracold alkali metal dimers
• Calculations of static dipole polarizabilities of alkali dimers. Prospects for alignment of ultracold molecules
• Structure and thermochemistry of K${}_2$Rb, KRb${}_2$ and K${}_2$Rb${}_2$

Cited by in corpus (17)

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• Manipulation of Molecules with Electromagnetic Fields
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• Precision test of statistical dynamics with state-to-state ultracold chemistry
• Probing photoinduced two-body loss of ultracold non-reactive bosonic ${}^{23}$Na${}^{87}$Rb and ${}^{23}$Na${}^{39}$K molecules
• Dynamics of ultracold molecules in confined geometry and electric field
• Universalities in ultracold reactions of alkali polar molecules
• Adimensional theory of shielding in ultracold collisions of dipolar rotors
• Tuning ultracold collisions of excited rotational dipolar molecules
• Chemical reactions of ultracold alkali-metal dimers in the lowest-energy ${}^3\Sigma$ state
• Tuning bimolecular chemical reactions by electric fields
• Statistical product distributions for ultracold reactions in external fields
• Chemical pathways in ultracold reactions of SrF molecules
• Collisional Aspects of Bosonic and Fermionic Dipoles in Quasi-Two-Dimensional Confining Geometries
• Total angular momentum representation for atom-molecule collisions in electric fields
• Multi-channel modeling and two photon coherent transfer paths in NaK
• Ultracold collisions of molecules