Photoassociation of ultracold long-range polyatomic molecules

Abstract

We explore the feasibility of optically forming long-range tetratomic and larger polyatomic molecules in their ground electronic state from ultracold pairs of polar molecules aligned by external fields. Depending on the relative orientation of the interacting diatomic molecules, we find that a tetratomic can be formed either as a weakly bound complex in a very extended halo state or as a pure long-range molecule composed of collinear or nearly-collinear diatomic molecules. The latter is a novel type of tetratomic molecule comprised of two diatomic molecules bound at long intermolecular range and predicted to be stable in cold and ultracold regimes. Our numerical studies were conducted for ultracold KRb and RbCs, resulting in production of (KRb)${}_2$ and (RbCs)${}_2$ complexes, respectively. Based on universal properties of long-range interactions between polar molecules, we identify triatomic and tetratomic linear polar molecules with favorable ratio of dipole and quadrupole moments for which the apporach could be generalized to form polyatomic molecules.

14 pages, 8 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Ultracold field-linked tetratomic molecules
• Electro-association of ultracold dipolar molecules into tetramer field-linked states
• Observation of photoassociation resonances in ultracold atom-molecule collisions
• An approximation scheme and non-Hermitian re-normalization for description of atom-field system evolution
• Strongly dipolar molecular Bose-Einstein condensates: From few- to many-body physics