Engineering excited-state interactions at ultracold temperatures

Abstract

Using a recently developed method for precisely controlling collision energy, we observe a dramatic suppression of inelastic collisions between an atom and ion (Ca + Yb${}^{+}$) at low collision energy. This suppression, which is expected to be a universal phenomenon, arises when the spontaneous emission lifetime of the excited state is comparable to or shorter than the collision complex lifetime. We develop a technique to remove this suppression and engineer excited-state interactions. By dressing the system with a strong catalyst laser, a significant fraction of the collision complexes can be excited at a specified internuclear separation. This technique allows excited-state collisions to be studied, even at ultracold temperature, and provides a general method for engineering ultracold excited-state interactions.

6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Ultracold Molecules in the Ro-Vibrational Triplet Ground State
• Controlling chemical reactions of a single particle
• Imaging of s and d partial-wave interference in quantum scattering of identical bosonic atoms
• Synthesis of mixed hypermetallic oxide BaOCa${}^{+}$ from laser-cooled reagents in an atom-ion hybrid trap
• Blue-sky bifurcation of ion energies and the limits of neutral-gas sympathetic cooling of trapped ions

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Excitation-assisted nonadiabatic charge-transfer reaction in a mixed atom-ion system