Ultracold Sticky Collisions: Theoretical and Experimental Status

Abstract

Collisional complexes, which are formed as intermediate states in molecular collisions, are typically short-lived and decay within picoseconds. However, in ultracold collisions involving bialkali molecules, complexes can live for milliseconds, completely changing the collision dynamics. This can lead to unexpected two-body loss in samples of nonreactive molecules. During the last decade, such "sticky" collisons have been a major hindrance in the preparation of dense and stable molecular samples, especially in the quantum-degenerate regime. Currently, the behavior of the complexes is not fully understood. For example, in some cases their lifetime has been measured to be many orders of magnitude longer than recent models predict. This is not only an intriguing problem in itself but also practically relevant, since understanding molecular complexes may help to mitigate their detrimental effects. Here, we review the recent experimental and theoretical progress in this field. We treat the case of molecule-molecule as well as molecule-atom collisions.

15 pages, 7 figures. Comments and suggestions welcome

References in corpus (23)

• A High Phase-Space-Density Gas of Polar Molecules
• Ultracold dense samples of dipolar RbCs molecules in the rovibrational and hyperfine ground state
• Ultracold Dipolar Gas of Fermionic ${}^{23}$Na${}^{40}$K Molecules in their Absolute Ground State
• Creation of ultracold ${}^{87}$RbCs molecules in the rovibrational ground state
• Non-standard Hubbard models in optical lattices: a review
• Reactions of ultracold alkali metal dimers
• Quantum phase transition in a two-dimensional system of dipoles
• Assembly of a rovibrational ground state molecule in an optical tweezer
• Anomalous Behavior of Spin Systems with Dipolar Interactions
• Collisions of ultracold ^{23}Na^{87}Rb molecules with controlled chemical reactivities
• Bimolecular chemistry in the ultracold regime
• Cold N+NH Collisions in a Magnetic Trap
• Ultracold Gas of Dipolar NaCs Ground State Molecules
• Collisions Between Ultracold Molecules and Atoms in a Magnetic Trap
• A Feshbach resonance in collisions between ultracold ground state molecules
• Field-linked resonances of polar molecules
• Unified model of ultracold molecular collisions
• Controlling Spin-flips of Molecules in an Electromagnetic Trap
• Efficient conversion of closed-channel dominated Feshbach molecules of ${}^{23}$Na${}^{40}$K to their absolute ground state
• Ultracold ${}^{88}{\mathrm{Sr}}_2$ molecules in the absolute ground state
• Resonant control of elastic collisions between ${}^{23}$Na${}^{40}$K molecules and ${}^{40}$K atoms
• Symmetry breaking in sticky collisions between ultracold molecules
• Magnetic trapping of ultracold molecules at high density

Cited by in corpus (30)

• Collisionally Stable Gas of Bosonic Dipolar Ground State Molecules
• Ultracold Gas of Dipolar NaCs Ground State Molecules
• Ultracold field-linked tetratomic molecules
• Diatomic molecules of alkali-metal and alkaline-earth-metal atoms: interaction potentials, dipole moments, and polarizabilities
• High density loading and collisional loss of laser cooled molecules in an optical trap
• Hyperfine-to-rotational energy transfer in ultracold atom-molecule collisions
• Electro-association of ultracold dipolar molecules into tetramer field-linked states
• Double Microwave Shielding
• Three-Body Recombination of Ultracold Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecules
• Efficient Pathway to NaCs Ground State Molecules
• Laser cooling of a fermionic molecule
• Magnetic Feshbach resonances in ultracold atom-molecule collisions
• Chemical reactions of ultracold alkaline-earth-metal diatomic molecules
• A ship-in-a-bottle quantum gas microscope setup for magnetic mixtures
• Spin Squeezing with Itinerant Dipoles: A Case for Shallow Lattices
• Sticking lifetime of ultracold CaF molecules in triplet interactions
• Dissipative Superfluidity in a Molecular Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Multichannel quantum defect theory with a frame transformation for ultracold atom-molecule collisions in magnetic fields
• Synthetic Mutual Gauge Field in Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecular Gases
• Macroscopic Particle Transport in Dissipative Long-Range Bosonic Systems
• CaF+CaF interactions in the ground and excited electronic states: implications for collisional losses
• Multi-state detection and spatial addressing in a microscope for ultracold molecules
• Narrowline Laser Cooling and Spectroscopy of Molecules via Stark States
• Universality and threshold laws for collision lifetimes at ultralow temperatures
• Efimov Effect in Ultracold Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecules
• Strongly dipolar molecular Bose-Einstein condensates: From few- to many-body physics
• Metastable ferromagnetic clusters in dissipative many-body systems of polar molecules
• A quadratic-scaling algorithm with guaranteed convergence for quantum coupled-channel calculations
• Charge Exchange Dynamics in Cold Collisions of ${}^{40}$CaH${}^{+}$ and ${}^{39}$K
• Stabilization of three-body resonances to bound states in a continuum