Walking with the atoms in a chemical bond : A perspective using quantum phase transition

Abstract

Classical phase transitions, like solid-liquid-gas or order-disorder spin magnetic phases, are all driven by thermal energy fluctuations by varying the temperature. On the other hand, quantum phase transitions happen at absolute zero temperature with quantum fluctuations causing the ground state energy to show abrupt changes as one varies the system parameters like electron density, pressure, disorder, or external magnetic field. Phase transitions happen at critical values of the controlling parameters, such as the critical temperature in classical phase transitions, and system critical parameters in the quantum case. However, true criticality happens only at the thermodynamic limit, when the number of particles goes to infinity with constant density. To perform the calculations for the critical parameters, finite size scaling approach was developed to extrapolate information from a finite system to the thermodynamic limit. With the advancement in the experimental and theoretical work in the field of ultra-cold systems, particularly trapping and controlling single atomic and molecular systems, one can ask: do finite systems exhibit quantum phase transition? To address this question, finite size scaling for finite system was developed to calculate the quantum critical parameters. Recent observation of a quantum phase transition in a single trapped 171 Yb ion in the Paul trap indicates the possibility of quantum phase transition in finite systems. This perspective focuses on examining chemical processes at ultracold temperature as quantum phase transitions, particularly the formation and dissociation of chemical bonds, which is the basic process for understanding the whole of chemistry

References in corpus (15)

• Feshbach Resonances in Ultracold Gases
• Quantum Phase Transition and Universal Dynamics in the Rabi model
• Signatures of bilayer Wigner crystals in a transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructure
• Building one molecule from a reservoir of two atoms
• Observation of a quantum phase transition in the quantum Rabi model with a single trapped ion
• Review of Decoherence Free Subspaces, Noiseless Subsystems, and Dynamical Decoupling
• Renormalization group fixed points, universal phase diagram, and 1/N expansion for quantum liquids with interactions near the unitarity limit
• A quantum magnetic analogue to the critical point of water
• Assembly of a rovibrational ground state molecule in an optical tweezer
• Control of reactive collisions by quantum interference
• Observing the emergence of a quantum phase transition -- shell by shell
• Single atom in a superoscillatory optical trap
• Imaging a ${}^6$Li Atom In An Optical Tweezer 2000 Times with $\Lambda$-Enhanced Gray Molasses
• Semiclassical quantisation for a bosonic atom-molecule conversion system
• Entropies and IPR as Markers for a Phase Transition in a Two-Level Model for Atom-Diatomic Molecule Coexistence