Ultracold homonuclear and heteronuclear collisions in metastable helium

Abstract

Scattering and ionizing cross sections and rates are calculated for ultracold collisions between metastable helium atoms using a fully quantum-mechanical close-coupled formalism. Homonuclear collisions of the bosonic ${}^4$He${}^{\ast }+{}^4$He${}^{\ast }$ and fermionic ${}^3$He${}^{\ast }+{}^3$He${}^{\ast }$ systems, and heteronuclear collisions of the mixed ${}^3$He${}^{\ast }+{}^4$He${}^{\ast }$ system, are investigated over a temperature range 1 $\mu$K to 1 K. Carefully constructed Born-Oppenheimer molecular potentials are used to describe the electrostatic interaction between the colliding atoms, and complex optical potentials used to represent loss through ionization from the ${}^{1,3}\Sigma$ states. Magnetic spin-dipole mediated transitions from the ${}^5\Sigma$ state are included and results reported for spin-polarized and unpolarized systems. Comparisons are made with experimental results, previous semi-classical models, and a perturbed single channel model.

arXiv comment14 pages, 9 figures

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Imaging recoil ions from optical collisions between ultracold, metastable neon isotopes
• Close-coupled model of Feshbach resonances in ultracold ${}^3$He* and ${}^4$He* atomic Collisions