Quantum-State Controlled Penning Ionization Reactions between Ultracold Alkali and Metastable Helium Atoms
Autor: | Flores, Adonis Silva, Vassen, Wim, Knoop, Steven |
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Rok vydání: | 2016 |
Předmět: | |
Zdroj: | Phys. Rev. A 94, 050701 (2016) |
Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
DOI: | 10.1103/PhysRevA.94.050701 |
Popis: | In an ultracold, optically trapped mixture of $^{87}$Rb and metastable triplet $^4$He atoms we have studied trap loss for different spin-state combinations, for which interspecies Penning ionization is the main two-body loss process. We observe long trapping lifetimes for the purely quartet spin-state combination, indicating strong suppression of Penning ionization loss by at least two orders of magnitude. For the other spin-mixtures we observe short lifetimes that depend linearly on the doublet character of the entrance channel. We compare the extracted loss rate coefficient with recent predictions of multichannel quantum-defect theory for reactive collisions involving a strong exothermic loss channel and find near-universal loss for doublet scattering. Our work demonstrates control of reactive collisions by internal atomic state preparation. Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures + Supplemental Materials |
Databáze: | arXiv |
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