Vibrational quenching and reactive processes of weakly bound molecular ion-atom collisions at cold temperatures

Abstract

We present a study of vibrational quenching and chemical processes of molecular ions immersed in an ultracold atomic gas by means of the quasi-classical trajectory (QCT) method. In particular, BaRb${}^{+}(v)$ + Rb collisions are studied at cold temperatures revealing a highly efficient energy transfer between the translational degrees of freedom and internal degrees of the molecular ion. Thus leading to a large vibrational quenching cross section which follows the Langevin capture model prediction. These results play a key role on the understanding of relaxation phenomena of cold molecular ions in ultracold gases as well as in the fate of the molecules emerging trough ion-neutral-neutral three-body recombination in an cold and dense environment.

9 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Hyperfine, rotational, and vibrational structure of the triplet ground state of Rb molecules

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Cold hybrid ion-atom systems
• Life and death of a cold BaRb${}^{+}$ molecule inside an ultracold cloud of Rb atoms
• Cold chemistry: a few-body perspective on impurity physics of a single ion in an ultracold bath
• Inelastic collision dynamics of a single cold ion immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Three-body recombination in physical chemistry
• Controlling the nature of a charged impurity in a bath of Feshbach dimers
• Rydberg atom-ion collisions in cold environments
• Vibrational quenching of cold molecular ions immersed in their parent gas
• Electric field dissociation of weakly bound molecular ions