Spin structure of diatomic van der Waals molecules of alkali atoms

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the spin structure of weakly bound diatomic van der Waals molecules formed by two identical bosonic alkali atoms. Our studies were performed using known Born-Oppenheimer potentials while developing a reduced interaction potential model. Such reduced potential models are currently a key for solving certain classes of few-body problems of atoms as they decrease the numerical burden on the computation. Although the reduced potentials are significantly shallower than actual Born-Oppenheimer potentials, they still capture the main properties of the near-threshold bound states, including their spin structure, and the scattering states over a broad range of magnetic fields. At zero magnetic field, we find that the variation in spin structure across different alkali species originates from the interplay between electronic spin exchange and hyperfine interactions. To characterize this competition we introduce a single parameter, which is a function of the singlet and triplet scattering lengths, the atomic hyperfine splitting constant, and the molecular binding energy. We show that this parameter can be used to classify the spin structure of vdW molecules for each atomic species.

References in corpus (27)

• Feshbach Resonances in Ultracold Gases
• Production of cold molecules via magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances
• Contact Measurements on Atomic BEC
• Feshbach spectroscopy and analysis of the interaction potentials of ultracold sodium
• Hyperfine, rotational, and vibrational structure of the triplet ground state of Rb molecules
• Feshbach resonances, weakly bound molecular states and coupled-channel potentials for cesium at high magnetic fields
• Few-body physics in resonantly interacting ultracold quantum gases
• Universal van der Waals Physics for Three Ultracold Atoms
• Stability of Complex Biomolecular Structures: Vander Waals, Hydrogen Bond Cooperativity, and Nuclear Quantum Effects
• Precision Test of the Limits to Universality in Few-Body Physics
• Contrasting the wide Feshbach resonances in ${}^6$Li and ${}^7$Li
• The Efimov effect for three interacting bosonic dipoles
• Observation of Efimov Universality across a Non-Universal Feshbach Resonance in \textsuperscript{39}K
• Formation of van der Waals molecules in buffer gas cooled magnetic traps
• Universal three-body physics for fermionic dipoles
• Formation and dynamics of van der Waals molecules in buffer-gas traps
• Cold, anisotropically-interacting van der Waals molecule: TiHe
• On the formation of van der Waals complexes through three-body recombination
• Beyond Born-Oppenheimer approximation in ultracold atomic collisions
• Classical threshold law for the formation of van der Waals molecules
• The multichannel nature of three-body recombination for ultracold ${}^{39}$K
• Magnetic quantum number resolved state-to-state chemistry
• Strong spin-exchange recombination of three weakly interacting ${}^7$Li atoms
• Emergent inflation of the Efimov spectrum under three-body spin-exchange interactions
• Energy-scaling of the product state distribution for three-body recombination of ultracold atoms
• A multichannel hyperspherical model for Efimov physics with van der Waals interactions controlled by a Feshbach resonance
• Spin hierarchy in van der Waals molecule formation via ultracold three-body recombination

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Lellouch-Lüscher relation for ultracold few-atom systems under confinement