Quantum-State Controlled Penning Ionization Reactions between Ultracold Alkali and Metastable Helium Atoms

Autor: Flores, Adonis Silva, Vassen, Wim, Knoop, Steven
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