Molecules near absolute zero and external field control of atomic and molecular dynamics

By R. Krems. 2005

242 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reviews the current state of the art in the field of cold and ultracold molecules and demonstrates that chemical reactions, inelastic collisions and dissociation of molecules at subkelvin temperatures can be manipulated with external electric or magnetic fields. The creation of ultracold molecules may allow for spectroscopy measurements with extremely high precision and tests of fundamental symmetries of nature, quantum computation with molecules as qubits, and controlled chemistry. The probability of chemical reactions and collisional energy transfer can be very large at temperatures near zero kelvin. The collision energy of ultracold atoms and molecules is much smaller than perturbations due to interactions with external electric or magnetic fields available in the laboratory. External fields may therefore be used to induce dissociation of weakly bound molecules, stimulate forbidden electronic transitions, suppress the effect of centrifugal barriers in outgoing reaction channels or tune Feshbach resonances that enhance chemical reactivity.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e00ef0247333b7f215b3953a3ad5d1ac4f36d818

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Spectroscopy

Citations in the corpus

Feshbach resonances in ultracold gases (2008, background): “See (Doyle et al., 2004; Hutson and Soldán, 2007; Krems, 2005) for overviews of the issues involved in trapping, cooling, and colliding such molecules.”
Controlling the quantum stereodynamics of ultracold bimolecular reactions (2010, background): “An ultracold gas, however, provides an optimum environment in which to fully investigate the dipolar effects [5, 15, 16].”
Cold and ultracold molecules: science, technology and applications (2009, background): “When molecules are cooled to low temperatures, inelastic and reactive collisions become extremely state-selective and propensities for populating specific rovibrational states are enhanced [54, 90], [97]–[99], [400].”
Quantum control of molecular rotation (2018, background): “Cold collision studies have by and large used the time-independent framework of scattering theory (Krems, 2005, 2008; Krems, Stwalley, and Friedrich, 2009; Lemeshko et al., 2013; Kłos and Lique, 2018; Quéméner, 2018).”
Taming molecular beams (2008, background): “The anisotropic long-range dipole–dipole interaction is predicted to give rise to new and rich physics in these cold dipolar gase”