Controlling the nature of a charged impurity in a bath of Feshbach dimers

Abstract

We theoretically study the dynamics of a trapped ion that is immersed in an ultracold gas of weakly bound atomic dimers created by a Feshbach resonance. Using quasi-classical simulations, we find a crossover from dimer dissociation to molecular ion formation depending on the binding energy of the dimers. The location of the crossover strongly depends on the collision energy and the time-dependent fields of the Paul trap. Deeply bound dimers lead to fast molecular ion formation, with rates approaching the Langevin collision rate ${\Gamma }_{\text{L}}^{\prime }\approx 4.8\times 10^{-9}$cm${}^3$s${}^{-1}$. The kinetic energies of the created molecular ions have a median below $1$mK, such that they will stay confined in the ion trap. We conclude that interacting ions and Feshbach molecules may provide a novel approach towards the creation of ultracold molecular ions with applications in precision spectroscopy and quantum chemistry.

9 pages and 12 figures including appendices

References in corpus (4)

• A trapped single ion inside a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Cold interactions between an Yb${}^{+}$ ion and a Li atom: Prospects for sympathetic cooling, radiative association, and Feshbach resonances
• Scanning tunnelling microscopy for ultracold atoms
• Formation of molecular ions by radiative association of cold trapped atoms and ions

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Observation of Feshbach resonances between a single ion and ultracold atoms
• Life and death of a cold BaRb${}^{+}$ molecule inside an ultracold cloud of Rb atoms
• Observation of Chemical Reactions between a Trapped Ion and Ultracold Feshbach Dimers
• Cold chemistry: a few-body perspective on impurity physics of a single ion in an ultracold bath
• Three-body recombination in physical chemistry
• Trap-assisted complexes in cold atom-ion collisions
• Buffer gas cooling of ions in time-dependent traps using ultracold atoms
• Ultracold ion-atom experiments: cooling, chemistry, and quantum effects
• Ion-atom-atom three-body recombination: from the cold to the thermal regime
• Rydberg atom-ion collisions in cold environments
• Experimental setup for studying an ultracold mixture of trapped Yb${}^{+}$-${}^6$Li
• Ion-atom-atom three-body recombination in cold hydrogen and deuterium plasmas
• The dynamics of a single trapped ion in a high density media: a stochastic approach
• Chaotic scattering and heating in cold ion-atom collisions: two sides of the same coin
• Universality in Ionic Three-body Systems Near an Ion-atom Feshbach Resonance
• Electric field dissociation of weakly bound molecular ions