Inelastic collisions of ultracold triplet Rb${}_{\text{2}}$ molecules in the rovibrational ground state

Abstract

Exploring inelastic and reactive collisions on the quantum level is a main goal of the developing field of ultracold chemistry. We present first experimental studies of inelastic collisions of metastable ultracold triplet molecules in the vibrational ground state. The measurements are performed with nonpolar ${\text{Rb}}_2$ dimers which are prepared in precisely-defined quantum states and trapped in an array of quasi-1D potential tubes. In particular, we investigate collisions of molecules in the absolute lowest triplet energy level where any inelastic process requires a change of the electronic state. Nevertheless, we find similar decay rates as for collisions between rotationally or vibrationally excited triplet molecules and they are close to the rates for universal reactions. As anticipated theoretically, the measured decay rate constants vary considerably when confinement and collision energy are changed. This might be exploited to control the collisional properties of molecules.

13 pages, 10 figures

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• Observation of Collisions between Two Ultracold Ground-State CaF Molecules
• Control of reactive collisions by quantum interference
• Diatomic molecules of alkali-metal and alkaline-earth-metal atoms: interaction potentials, dipole moments, and polarizabilities
• Controlling Spin-flips of Molecules in an Electromagnetic Trap
• Reaction kinetics of ultracold molecule-molecule collisions
• Quantum spin state selectivity and magnetic tuning of ultracold chemical reactions of triplet alkali-metal dimers with alkali-metal atoms
• Molecular Collisions: from Near-cold to Ultra-cold
• Observation of trap-assisted formation of atom-ion bound states
• State-to-state endothermic and nearly thermoneutral reactions in an ultracold atom-dimer mixture
• Limitations of coupled cluster approximations for highlyaccurate investigations of Rb${}_2^{+}$
• Quantum reactive scattering in the long-range ion-dipole potential