Magnetic Feshbach resonances in collisions of non-magnetic closed-shell molecules
arXiv:1209.1418 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.89.032716
Abstract
Magnetic Feshbach resonances play a central role in experimental research of atomic gases at ultracold temperatures, as they allow one to control the microscopic interactions between ultracold atoms by tuning an applied magnetic field. These resonances arise due to strong hyperfine interactions between the unpaired electron and the nuclear magnetic moment of the alkali metal atoms. A major thrust of current research is to create an ultracold gas of diatomic alkali-metal molecules in the ground rovibrational state of the ground electronic state. Unlike alkali metal atoms, diatomic molecules have no unpaired electrons. However, the hyperfine interactions of molecules may give rise to magnetic Feshbach resonances. We use quantum scattering calculations to study the possible width of these resonances. Our results show that the widths of magnetic Feshbach resonances in ultracold molecule-molecule collisions for molecules may exceed 1 milliGauss, rendering such resonances experimentally detectable. We hope that this work will stimulate the experimental search of these resonances.
8 pages, 4 figures
References in corpus (9)
- A High Phase-Space-Density Gas of Polar Molecules
- Reactions of ultracold alkali metal dimers
- The hyperfine energy levels of alkali metal dimers: ground-state polar molecules in electric and magnetic fields
- Quantum Spin Dynamics of Mode-Squeezed Luttinger Liquids in Two-Component Atomic Gases
- Strong dependence of ultracold chemical rates on electric dipole moments
- Observation of Feshbach resonances between ultracold Na and Rb atoms
- A high phase-space density mixture of Rb and Cs: towards ultracold heteronuclear molecules
- Mott insulator to superfluid transition of ultracold bosons in an optical lattice near a Feshbach resonance
- Elastic and inelastic collisions of molecules in a magnetic field