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.

arXiv comment7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (28)

• Cold and Ultracold Molecules: Science, Technology, and Applications
• Production of cold molecules via magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances
• Universal few-body physics and cluster formation
• Controlling the hyperfine state of rovibronic ground-state polar molecules
• Macrodimers: ultralong range Rydberg molecules
• Tutorial: Calculation of Rydberg interaction potentials
• Production of trilobite Rydberg molecule dimers with thousand-Debye permanent electric dipole moments
• Rydberg trimers and excited dimers bound by internal quantum reflection
• Observation of pendular butterfly Rydberg molecules
• Ultracold Rydberg Molecules
• Alignment of D-state Rydberg molecules
• Photoassociation of long-range $nD$ Rydberg molecules
• Ultracold chemical reactions of a single Rydberg atom in a dense gas
• Quantum gas microscopy of Rydberg macrodimers
• Ultralong-range Rydberg molecules
• Observation of Rydberg-atom macrodimers: micrometer-sized diatomic molecules
• Spatial imaging of a novel type of molecular ions
• Long-range Rydberg-atom-ion molecules of Rb and Cs
• Dipole-Dipole coupled double Rydberg molecules
• Long-range atom-ion Rydberg molecule: A novel molecular binding mechanism
• A pulsed ion microscope to probe quantum gases
• Photo-association of trilobite Rydberg molecules via resonant spin-orbit coupling
• Synthetic dimension-induced conical intersections in Rydberg molecules
• Heteronuclear long-range Rydberg molecules
• Spin-Interaction Effects for Ultralong-range Rydberg Molecules in a Magnetic Field
• Swirling the weakly bound helium dimer from inside
• 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