Production of trilobite Rydberg molecule dimers with thousand-Debye permanent electric dipole moments

Abstract

We observe that when an ultracold ground state cesium (Cs) atom becomes bound within the electronic cloud of an extended Cs electronic orbit, ultralong-range molecules with giant (kilo-Debye) permanent electric dipole moments form. Large molecular permanent electric dipole moments are challenging to experimentally realize. Meeting this challenge has garnered significant interest because permanent electric dipole moments are important for understanding symmetry breaking in molecular physics, control of chemical reactions and realization of strongly correlated many-body quantum systems. These new hybrid class of `trilobite' molecules are predominated with degenerate Rydberg manifolds, making them difficult to produce with conventional optical association. Their behavior is quantitatively reproduced with detailed coupled-channel calculations.

18 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Science on 2014-09-03; v2: "One-sentence summary" removed from title

References in corpus (2)

• Quasiclassical calculations of BBR-induced depopulation rates and effective lifetimes of Rydberg nS, nP and nD alkali-metal atoms with n < 80
• Experimental verification of minima in excited long-range Rydberg states of Rb_2

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• Light interactions with polar quantum systems
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