Inelastic collision dynamics of a single cold ion immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We investigate inelastic collision dynamics of a single cold ion in a Bose-Einstein condensate. We observe rapid ion-atom-atom three-body recombination leading to formation of weakly bound molecular ions followed by secondary two-body molecule-atom collisions quenching the rovibrational states towards deeper binding energies. In contrast to previous studies exploiting hybrid ion traps, we work in an effectively field-free environment and generate a free low-energy ionic impurity directly from the atomic ensemble via Rydberg excitation and ionization. This allows us to implement an energy-resolved field-dissociation technique to trace the relaxation dynamics of the recombination products. Our observations are in good agreement with numerical simulations based on Langevin capture dynamics and provide complementary means to study stability and reaction dynamics of ionic impurities in ultracold quantum gases.

arXiv comment5 pages, 3 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2007.00309

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• Long-range Rydberg-atom-ion molecules of Rb and Cs
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• Imaging the interface of a qubit and its quantum-many-body environment
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• High-accuracy Rb${}_2^{+}$ interaction potentials based on coupled cluster calculations
• Cooling dynamics of a free ion in a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Non-resonant inter-species interaction and its effect on the position response function of cold atoms
• False signals of chaos from quantum probes
• Electric field dissociation of weakly bound molecular ions