No Arabic abstract
Positron cooling via inelastic collisions in CF$_4$ and N$_2$ gases is simulated, including positron-positron interactions. Owing to the molecular symmetries, cooling is assumed to be chiefly due to energy loss via vibrational (rotational) excitations for CF$_4$ (N$_2$). For CF$_4$, it is found that the inclusion of the dipole-inactive $ u_1$ mode, in addition to the dipole-active modes $ u_3$ and $ u_4$, can provide room-temperature thermalization and an accurate cooling timescale. Combination cooling enabled by the $ u_1$ mode, and positron-positron interactions both contribute to the Maxwellianization of the positron momentum distribution. For both gases the evolution of the positron temperature is found to be in excellent agreement with experiment.
We present an experimental study on the rotational inelastic scattering of OH ($X^2Pi_{3/2}, J=3/2, f$) radicals with He and D$_2$ at collision energies between 100 and 500 cm$^{-1}$ in a crossed beam experiment. The OH radicals are state selected and velocity tuned using a Stark decelerator. Relative parity-resolved state-to-state inelastic scattering cross sections are accurately determined. These experiments complement recent low-energy collision studies between trapped OH radicals and beams of He and D$_2$ that are sensitive to the total (elastic and inelastic) cross sections (Sawyer emph{et al.}, emph{Phys. Rev. Lett.} textbf{2008}, emph{101}, 203203), but for which the measured cross sections could not be reproduced by theoretical calculations (Pavlovic emph{et al.}, emph{J. Phys. Chem. A} textbf{2009}, emph{113}, 14670). For the OH-He system, our experiments validate the inelastic cross sections determined from rigorous quantum calculations.
We theoretically study trapped ions that are immersed in an ultracold gas of Rydberg-dressed atoms. By off-resonant coupling on a dipole-forbidden transition, the adiabatic atom-ion potential can be made repulsive. We study the energy exchange between the atoms and a single trapped ion and find that Langevin collisions are inhibited in the ultracold regime for these repulsive interactions. Therefore, the proposed system avoids recently observed ion heating in hybrid atom-ion systems caused by coupling to the ions radio frequency trapping field and retains ultracold temperatures even in the presence of excess micromotion.
In dense atomic gases the interaction between transition dipoles and photons leads to the formation of many-body states with collective dissipation and long-ranged forces. Despite decades of research, a full understanding of this paradigmatic many-body problem is still lacking. Here, we put forward and explore a scenario in which a dense atomic gas is weakly excited by an off-resonant laser field. We develop the theory for describing such dressed many-body ensembles and show that collective excitations are responsible for the emergence of many-body interactions, i.e. effective potentials that cannot be represented as a sum of binary terms. We illustrate how interaction effects may be probed through microwave spectroscopy via the analysis of time-dependent line-shifts, and show that these signals are sensitive to the phase pattern of the dressing laser. Our study offers a new perspective on dense atomic ensembles interacting with light and promotes this platform as a setting for the exploration of rich non-equilibrium many-body physics.
The positron-hydrogen atom scattering system is considered within the S-wave model. Convergence in the elastic scattering, excitation, ionization, and positronium formation channels is studied as a function of the number and type of states used to expand the total wave function. It is found that all unphysical resonances disappear only if near-complete pseudostate expansions are applied to both the atomic and positronium centers.
We present an experimental and theoretical study of atom-molecule collisions in a mixture of cold, trapped atomic nitrogen and NH molecules at a temperature of $sim 600$~mK. We measure a small N+NH trap loss rate coefficient of $k^{(mathrm{N+NH})}_mathrm{loss} = 8(4) times 10^{-13}$~cm$^{3}$s$^{-1}$. Accurate quantum scattering calculations based on {it ab initio} interaction potentials are in agreement with experiment and indicate the magnetic dipole interaction to be the dominant loss mechanism. Our theory further indicates the ratio of N+NH elastic to inelastic collisions remains large ($>100$) into the mK regime.