Rydberg-State-Resolved Resonant Energy Transfer in Cold Electric-Field-Controlled Intrabeam Collisions of NH${}_3$ with Rydberg He Atoms

Abstract

The resonant transfer of energy from the inversion sublevels in NH${}_3$ to He atoms in triplet Rydberg states with principal quantum number $n=38$ has been controlled using electric fields below 15 V/cm in intrabeam collisions at translational temperatures of $\sim 1$ K. The experiments were performed in pulsed supersonic beams of NH${}_3$ seeded in He at a ratio of 1:19. The He atoms were prepared in the metastable 1s2s ${}^3$S${}_1$ level in a pulsed electric discharge in the trailing part of the beams. The velocity slip between the heavy NH${}_3$ and the lighter metastable He was exploited to perform collision studies at center-of-mass collision speeds of $\sim 70$ m/s. Resonant energy transfer in the atom-molecule collisions was identified by Rydberg-state-selective electric-field ionization. The experimental data have been compared to a theoretical model of the resonant dipole-dipole interactions between the collision partners based on the impact parameter method.

6 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Ultracold atom-electron interaction: from two to many-body physics
• Observation of enhanced rate coefficients in the H${}_2^{+}$ + H${}_2$ $\to$ H${}_3^{+}$ + H reaction at low collision energies
• Observation of dipole-quadrupole interaction in an ultracold gas of Rydberg atoms
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Quantum state resolved molecular dipolar collisions over four decades of energy
• Ion-molecule reactions below 1~K: Observation of a strong enhancement of the reaction rate of the ion-dipole reaction He${}^{+}$+ CH${}_3$F
• Slow decay processes of electrostatically trapped Rydberg NO molecules
• Probing van der Waals interactions and detecting polar molecules by Förster resonance energy transfer with Rydberg atoms at temperatures below 100 mK