Photoassociation spectroscopy in Penning ionization reactions at sub-Kelvin temperatures

Abstract

Penning ionization reactions in merged beams with precisely controlled collision energies have been shown to accurately probe quantum mechanical effects in reactive collisions. A complete microscopic understanding of the reaction is, however, faced with two major challenges---the highly excited character of the reaction's entrance channel and the limited precision of even the best state-of-the-art ab initio potential energy surfaces. Here, we suggest photoassociation spectroscopy as a tool to identify the character of orbiting resonances in the entrance channel and probe the ionization width as a function of inter-particle separation. We introduce the basic concept and discuss the general conditions under which this type of spectroscopy will be successful.

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of Quantum Effects in sub Kelvin Cold Reactions
• Dynamics of gas phase Ne${}^{\ast }$ + NH${}_3$ and Ne${}^{\ast }$ + ND${}_3$ Penning ionization at low temperatures
• Enhancing photoassociation rates by non-resonant light control of shape resonances
• First-principle interaction potentials for metastable He(${}^3$S) and Ne(${}^3$P) with closed-shell molecules. Application to Penning-Ionizing systems

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Quantum control of molecular rotation
• Ultrafast creation of overlapping Rydberg electrons in an atomic BEC and Mott-insulator lattice
• Imaging recoil ions from optical collisions between ultracold, metastable neon isotopes
• Single-Source, Collinear Merged-Beam Experiment for the Study of Reactive Neutral-Neutral Collisions