Photo-association of trilobite Rydberg molecules via resonant spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

We report on a novel method for photo-association of strongly polar trilobite Rydberg molecules. This exotic ultralong-range dimer, consisting of a ground-state atom bound to the Rydberg electron via electron-neutral scattering, inherits its polar character from the admixture of high angular momentum electronic orbitals. The absence of low-$L$ character hinders standard photo-association techniques. Here, we show that for suitable principal quantum numbers resonant coupling of the orbital motion with the nuclear spin of the perturber, mediated by electron-neutral scattering, hybridizes the trilobite molecular potential with the more conventional $\mathrm{S}$-type molecular state. This provides a general path to associate trilobite molecules with large electric dipole moments, as demonstrated via high-resolution spectroscopy. We find a dipole moment of 135(45) D for the trilobite state. Our results are compared to theoretical predictions based on a Fermi-model.

8 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Production of trilobite Rydberg molecule dimers with thousand-Debye permanent electric dipole moments
• Ultracold atom-electron interaction: from two to many-body physics
• Experimental characterization of singlet scattering channels in long-range Rydberg molecules
• A comparative analysis of binding in ultralong-range Rydberg molecules

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• Angular-Momentum Couplings in Ultra-Long-Range Giant Dipole Molecules
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