Rydberg atom-ion collisions in cold environments

Abstract

Low-energy collisions of Rydberg atom-ion systems are investigated theoretically. We present the parameter space associated with suitable approaches for the dynamics of Rydberg atom-ion collisions, i.e. quantum-, Langevin and classical exchange regimes, showing that for the lowest reachable temperatures a classical treatment is appropriate. A quasi-classical trajectory method is used to study charge exchange cross sections for Li${}^{\ast }$-Li${}^{+}$ and Li${}^{\ast }$-Cs${}^{+}$ at collision energies down to $1$K. For cold collisions we find the charge exchange cross section deviating from the $n^4$ geometric scaling. Furthermore, for low-energy collisions, we find both an influence of the ionic core-repulsion as well as variations for two different models used for describing the electron-core potential.

7 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Dynamical crystallization in a low-dimensional Rydberg gas
• Quantum critical behavior in strongly interacting Rydberg gases
• Production of trilobite Rydberg molecule dimers with thousand-Debye permanent electric dipole moments
• Rydberg atoms in astrophysics
• Controlling the nature of a charged impurity in a bath of Feshbach dimers