Heteronuclear long-range Rydberg molecules

26 May 2020  ·  Peper Michael, Deiglmayr Johannes ·

We present the formation of homonuclear Cs2, K2, and heteronuclear CsK long-range Rydberg molecules in a dual-species magneto-optical trap for 39K and 133Cs by one-photon UV photoassociation. The different ground-state-density dependence of homo- and heteronuclear photoassociation rates and the detection of stable molecular ions resulting from auto-ionization provide an unambiguous assignment. We perform bound-bound millimeter-wave spectroscopy of long-range Rydberg molecules to access molecular states not accessible by one-photon photoassociation. A comparison to binding energies calculated with the most recent theoretical model and atomic parameters reveals the inadequacy of this approach to correctly describe the full set of our observations from homo- and heteronuclear long-range Rydberg molecules. We show that the data from photoassociation spectroscopy of heteronuclear long-range Rydberg molecules provides a benchmark for the development of theoretical models which facilitate the accurate extraction of low-energy electron-neutral scattering phase shifts.

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Atomic Physics Quantum Physics