Vibronic interactions in trilobite and butterfly Rydberg molecules

Abstract

Ultralong-range Rydberg molecules provide an exciting testbed for molecular physics at exaggerated scales. In the so-called trilobite and butterfly Rydberg molecules, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation can fail due to strong non-adiabatic couplings arising from the combination of radial oscillations and rapid energy variations in the adiabatic potential energy curves. We utilize an accurate coupled-channel treatment of the vibronic system to observe the breakdown of Born-Oppenheimer physics, such as non-adiabatic trapping and decay of molecular states found near pronounced avoided crossings in the adiabatic potential curves. Even for vibrational states localized far away from avoided crossings, a single channel model is quantitatively sufficient only after including the diagonal non-adiabatic corrections to the Born-Oppenheimer potentials. Our results indicate the importance of including non-adiabatic physics in the description of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules and in the interpretation of measured vibronic spectra.

11 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Experimental characterization of singlet scattering channels in long-range Rydberg molecules
• Observation of Rydberg-atom macrodimers: micrometer-sized diatomic molecules
• A comparative analysis of binding in ultralong-range Rydberg molecules
• Observation of vibrational dynamics of orientated Rydberg-atom-ion molecules
• Dressed ion-pair states of an ultralong-range Rydberg molecule

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Green's function treatment of Rydberg molecules with spins
• Non-adiabatic interaction effects in the spectra of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules
• Kato's theorem and ultralong-range Rydberg molecules
• Internal diffraction dynamics of trilobite molecules
• $In$ $situ$ observation of non-polar to strongly polar atom-ion collision dynamics
• Hidden $sl(2)-$Symmetry of the Generalized Landau-Zener Vibronic Model