Observation of vibrational dynamics of orientated Rydberg-atom-ion molecules

Abstract

Vibrational dynamics in conventional molecules usually takes place on a timescale of picoseconds or shorter. A striking exception are ultralong-range Rydberg molecules, for which dynamics is dramatically slowed down as a consequence of the huge bond length of up to several micrometers. Here, we report on the direct observation of vibrational dynamics of a recently observed Rydberg-atom-ion molecule. By applying a weak external electric field of a few mV/cm, we are able to control the orientation of the photoassociated ultralong-range Rydberg molecules and induce vibrational dynamics by quenching the electric field. A high resolution ion microscope allows us to detect the molecule's orientation and its temporal vibrational dynamics in real space. Our study opens the door to the control of molecular dynamics in Rydberg molecules.

7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Production of trilobite Rydberg molecule dimers with thousand-Debye permanent electric dipole moments
• Observation of Rydberg-atom macrodimers: micrometer-sized diatomic molecules
• Spatial imaging of a novel type of molecular ions
• Long-range atom-ion Rydberg molecule: A novel molecular binding mechanism
• Synthetic dimension-induced conical intersections in Rydberg molecules
• Electric field-induced wave-packet dynamics and geometrical rearrangement of trilobite Rydberg molecules
• Non-adiabatic decay of Rydberg-atom-ion molecules

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Cold trapped molecular ions and hybrid platforms for ions and neutral particles
• In-situ Imaging of a Single-Atom Wave Packet in Continuous Space
• Vibronic interactions in trilobite and butterfly Rydberg molecules
• Non-adiabatic interaction effects in the spectra of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules
• Rydberg Macrodimers: Diatomic molecules on the micrometer scale
• Charged ultralong-range Rydberg trimers
• Microwave photo-association of fine-structure-induced Rydberg $(n+2)D_{5/2}n{F}_J$ macro-dimer molecules of cesium
• Order-by-disorder and emergent Kosterlitz-Thouless phase in triangular Rydberg array
• Rydberg atom arrays as quantum simulators for molecular dynamics
• $In$ $situ$ observation of non-polar to strongly polar atom-ion collision dynamics
• Internal diffraction dynamics of trilobite molecules
• Time-resolved Coulomb explosion imaging of vibrational wave packets in alkali dimers on helium nanodroplets
• Cold hybrid electrical-optical ion trap
• Vibrationally coupled Rydberg atom-ion molecules
• Non-resonant inter-species interaction and its effect on the position response function of cold atoms