Bimolecular chemistry in the ultracold regime

Abstract

Advances in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics techniques allowed the cooling of simple molecules down to the ultracold regime ($\lesssim$ 1 mK), and opened the opportunities to study chemical reactions with unprecedented levels of control. This review covers recent developments in studying bimolecular chemistry at ultralow temperatures. We begin with a brief overview of methods for producing, manipulating, and detecting ultracold molecules. We then survey experimental works that exploit the controllability of ultracold molecules to probe and modify their long-range interactions. Further combining the use of physical chemistry techniques, such as mass spectrometry and ion imaging, significantly improved the detection of ultracold reactions and enabled explorations of their dynamics in the short-range. We discuss a series of studies on the reaction KRb + KRb $\to$ K${}_2$ + Rb${}_2$ initiated below 1 $\mu$K, including the direct observation of a long-lived complex, the demonstration of product rotational state control via conserved nuclear spins, and a test of the statistical model using the complete quantum state distribution of the products.

25 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Annual Review of Physical Chemistry on 06/15/2021

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Cited by in corpus (33)

• Ultracold Sticky Collisions: Theoretical and Experimental Status
• A Feshbach resonance in collisions between ultracold ground state molecules
• Field-linked resonances of polar molecules
• Long-lived entanglement of molecules in magic-wavelength optical tweezers
• Enhanced quantum control of individual ultracold molecules using optical tweezer arrays
• Ultracold field-linked tetratomic molecules
• Electric-field-controlled cold dipolar collisions between trapped CH${}_3$F molecules
• Signatures of Non-universal Quantum Dynamics of Ultracold Chemical Reactions of Polar Alkali-dimer Molecules with Alkali-metal Atoms: Li(${}^2$S) +NaLi($a^3{\Sigma }^{+}$) $\to$ Na(${}^2$S) + Li${}_2$($a^3{\Sigma }_u^{+}$)
• Rotational-state dependence of interactions between polar molecules
• Theory of angular momentum transfer from light to molecules
• Laser cooling of a fermionic molecule
• Symmetry breaking in sticky collisions between ultracold molecules
• Ultracold molecular collisions in magnetic fields: Efficient incorporation of hyperfine structure in the total rotational angular momentum representation
• Intercombination line photoassociation spectroscopy of ${}^{87}$Rb${}^{170}$Yb
• Spin Squeezing with Itinerant Dipoles: A Case for Shallow Lattices
• Engineering long-range molecular potentials by external drive
• Cold hybrid electrical-optical ion trap
• Interaction-Region Decoupling through Structured Absorbing Potentials: A Framework for Scalable Time-Dependent Quantum Dynamics Calculations
• DiPolMol-Py: A Python package for calculations for ${}^2\Sigma$ ground-state molecules
• Formation of deeply bound polar molecules combining pump-dump pulses with infrared radiation
• Magneto-Optical Trapping of a Metal Hydride Molecule
• Tomography of a single-atom-resolved detector in the presence of shot-to-shot number fluctuations
• Model-Based Real-Time Synthesis of Acousto-Optically Generated Laser-Beam Patterns and Tweezer Arrays
• Single-photon loading of polar molecules into an optical trap
• Chemistry in a Cryogenic Buffer Gas Cell
• Rigorous quantum calculations for atom-molecule chemical reactions in electric fields: from single to multiple partial wave regimes
• Optimizing Pulsed-Laser Ablation Production of AlCl Molecules for Laser Cooling
• Highly spin-polarized molecules via collisional microwave pumping
• Automated Graph-Based Detection of Quantum Control Schemes: Application to Molecular Laser Cooling
• Strongly dipolar molecular Bose-Einstein condensates: From few- to many-body physics
• Characterization of Feshbach resonances in ${}^6\mathrm{Li}{-}^7\mathrm{Li}$ using improved interaction potentials
• Non-resonant cavity for intensity buildup of multiple lasers
• Universality and threshold laws for collision lifetimes at ultralow temperatures