Homonuclear ionizing collisions of laser-cooled metastable helium atoms

Abstract

We present a theoretical and experimental investigation of homonuclear ionizing collisions of laser-cooled metastable helium atoms, considering both the fermionic He-3 and bosonic He-4 isotope. The theoretical description combines quantum threshold behavior, Wigner's spin-conservation rule and quantum statistical symmetry requirements in a single-channel model, complementing a more complete close-coupling theory that has been reported for collisions of metastable He-4 atoms. The model is supported with measurements (in the absence of light fields) of ionization rates in magneto-optically trapped samples, that contain about 3*10^8 atoms of a single isotope. The ionization rates are determined from measurements of trap loss due to light-assisted collisions combined with comparative measurements of the ion production rate in the absence and presence of trapping light. Theory and experiment show good agreement.

arXiv comment15 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. A

References in corpus (9)

• Bose-Einstein Condensation of Metastable Helium
• Long-range interactions of metastable helium atoms
• Ultracold collisions of metastable helium atoms
• A Large Atom Number Metastable Helium Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Getting the elastic scattering length by observing inelastic collisions in ultracold metastable helium atoms
• Penning collisions of laser-cooled metastable helium atoms
• Ionization rates in a Bose-Einstein condensate of metastable Helium
• Frequency shifts of photoassociative spectra of ultracold metastable Helium atoms : a new measurement of the s-wave scattering length
• Limit on suppression of ionization in metastable neon traps due to long-range anisotropy

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Cold and trapped metastable noble gases
• A Degenerate Bose-Fermi Mixture of Metastable Atoms
• Paired atom laser beams created via four-wave mixing
• Bose-Einstein Condensation and Spin Mixtures of Optically Trapped Metastable Helium
• Ultracold mixtures of metastable He and Rb: scattering lengths from ab initio calculations and thermalization measurements
• Heteronuclear ionizing collisions between laser-cooled metastable helium atoms
• Trapping cold ground state argon atoms for sympathetic cooling of molecules
• Helium 2 3S - 2 1S metrology at 1557 nm
• Feshbach resonances in 3He*-4He* mixtures
• Imaging recoil ions from optical collisions between ultracold, metastable neon isotopes
• Two-body loss rates for reactive collisions of cold atoms
• Ultracold homonuclear and heteronuclear collisions in metastable helium
• Heteronuclear collisions between laser-cooled metastable neon atoms
• Coherent control mechanisms of Penning and associative ionization in cold He${}^{\ast }(2^3\text{S})$-He${}^{\ast }(2^3\text{S})$ reactive scattering