Theory of long-range ultracold atom-molecule photoassociation

Abstract

The creation of ultracold molecules is currently limited to diatomic species. In this letter we present a theoretical description of the photoassociation of ultracold atoms and molecules to create ultracold excited triatomic molecules, thus being a novel example of light-assisted ultracold chemical reaction. The calculation of the photoassociation rate of ultracold Cs atoms with ultracold Cs${}_2$ molecules in their rovibrational ground state is reported, based on the solution of the quantum dynamics involving the atom-molecule long-range interactions, and assuming a model potential for the short-range physics. The rate for the formation of excited Cs${}_3$ molecules is predicted to be comparable with currently observed atom-atom photoassociation rates. We formulate an experimental proposal to observe this process relying on the available techniques of optical lattices and standard photoassociation spectroscopy.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Observation of an Efimov spectrum in an atomic system
• Evidence for Universal Four-Body States Tied to an Efimov Trimer
• Inelastic collisions of ultra-cold heteronuclear molecules in an optical trap
• Feshbach resonances, weakly bound molecular states and coupled-channel potentials for cesium at high magnetic fields
• Photoassociation of ultracold LiRb* molecules: observation of high efficiency and unitarity-limited rate saturation
• Statistical product distributions for ultracold reactions in external fields
• Resonant atom-dimer collisions in cesium: Testing universality at positive scattering lengths

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• Ultracold Molecule Assembly with Photonic Crystals
• Photoassociation of ultracold long-range polyatomic molecules
• Triatomic Photoassociation in an Ultracold Atom-Molecule Collision
• The chemistry of AlF and CaF production in buffer gas sources
• $C_6$ coefficients for interacting Rydberg atoms and alkali-metal dimers
• Calculations of long-range three-body interactions for Li($2{}^{2}S$)-Li($2{}^{2}S$)-Li($2{}^{2}P$)
• Dynamics of translational and rotational thermalization of AlF molecules via collisions with cryogenic helium
• Long-range additive and nonadditive potentials in a hybrid system: Ground state atom, excited state atom, and ion
• Formation of ultracold triatomic molecules by electric microwave association
• Optical formation of ultracold NaK${}_2$ ground state molecules