No Arabic abstract
We report the first experimental evidence of spontaneous electron emission from a homonuclear dimer anion through direct measurements of $rm{Ag}_2^- rightarrow rm{Ag}_2 + rm{e}^-$ decays on milliseconds and seconds time scales. This observation is very surprising as there is no avoided crossing between adiabatic energy curves to mediate such a process. The process is weak but yet dominates the decay signal after 100 ms when ensembles of internally hot Ag$_2^-$ ions are stored in the cryogenic ion-beam storage ring, DESIREE, for 10 seconds. The electron emission process is associated with an instantaneous, very large, reduction of the vibrational energy of the dimer system. This represents a dramatic deviation from a Born-Oppenheimer description of dimer dynamics.
Spontaneous decays of small, hot silver cluster anions Ag$_{n}$, $n=4-7$ have been studied using one of the rings of the Double ElectroStatic Ion Ring ExpEriment (DESIREE). Observation of these decays over very long time scales is possible due to the very low residual gas pressure ($sim10^{-14}$) and cryogenic (13 K) operation of DESIREE. The yield of neutral particles from stored beams of Ag$_{6}$ and Ag$_{7}$ anions were measured for 100 milliseconds and were found to follow single power law behaviour with millisecond time scale exponential cut-offs. The Ag$_{4}$ and Ag$_{5}$ anions were stored for 60 seconds and the observed decays show two-component power law behaviors. We present calculations of the rate constants for electron detachment from, and fragmentation of Ag$_{4}$ and Ag$_{5}$. In these calculations, we assume that the internal energy distribution of the clusters are flat and with this we reproduce the early steep parts of the experimentally measured decay curves for Ag$_{4}$ and Ag$_{5}$, which extends to tens and hundreds of milliseconds, respectively. The fact that the calculations reproduce the early slopes of Ag$_{4}$ and Ag$_{5}$, which differ for the two cases, suggests that it is the changes in fragmentation rates with internal cluster energies of Ag$_{4}$ and Ag$_{5}$ rather than conditions in the ion source that determines this behavior. Comparisons with the measurements strongly suggest that the neutral particles detected in these time domains originate from Ag$_{4} rightarrow$ Ag$_{3}+$ Ag and Ag$_{5}rightarrow$ Ag$_{3}+$ Ag$_{2}$ fragmentation processes.
We have measured the spontaneous neutral particle emission from copper cluster anions (Cu$_n^-$, $n=3-6$) stored at cryogenic temperatures in one of the electrostatic ion storage rings of the DESIREE (Double ElectroStatic Ion Ring ExpEriment) facility at Stockholm University. The measured rate of emission from the stored Cu$_3^-$ ions follows a single power law decay for about 1 ms but then decreases much more rapidly with time. The latter behavior may be due to a decrease in the density of available final states in Cu$_3$ as the excitation energies of the decaying ions approach the electron detachment threshold. The emissions from Cu$_4^-$, Cu$_5^-$ and Cu$_6^-$ are well-described by sums of two power laws that are quenched by radiative cooling of the stored ions with characteristic times between a few and hundreds of milliseconds. We relate these two-component behaviors to populations of stored ions with higher and lower angular momenta. In a separate experiment, we studied the laser-induced decay of Cu$_6^-$ ions that were excited by 1.13 eV or 1.45 eV photons after 46 milliseconds of storage.
The spectrum of heavy-quark hybrids is studied in the leading Born-Oppenheimer (LBO) approximation and using leading-order NRQCD simulations with an improved gluon action on anisotropic lattices. The masses of four hybrid states are obtained from our simulations for lattice spacings 0.1 fm and 0.2 fm and are compared to the LBO predictions obtained using previously-determined glue-excited static potentials. The consistency of results from the two approaches reveals a compelling physical picture for heavy-quark hybrid states.
Controlling the interactions between atoms with external fields opened up new branches in physics ranging from strongly correlated atomic systems to ideal Bose and Fermi gases and Efimov physics. Such control usually prepares samples that are stationary or evolve adiabatically in time. On the other hand, in molecular physics external ultrashort laser fields are employed to create anisotropic potentials that launch ultrafast rotational wave packets and align molecules in free space. Here we combine these two regimes of ultrafast times and low energies. We apply a short laser pulse to the helium dimer, a weakly bound and highly delocalized single bound state quantum system. The laser field locally tunes the interaction between two helium atoms, imparting an angular momentum of $2hbar$ and evoking an initially confined dissociative wave packet. We record a movie of the density and phase of this wave packet as it evolves from the inside out. At large internuclear distances, where the interaction between the two helium atoms is negligible, the wave packet is essentially free. This work paves the way for future tomography of wave packet dynamics and provides the technique for studying exotic and otherwise hardly accessible quantum systems such as halo and Efimov states.
We report on deviations beyond the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in the potassium inter-atomic potentials. Identifying three up-to-now unknown $d$-wave Feshbach resonances, we significantly improve the understanding of the $^{39}$K inter-atomic potentials. Combining these observations with the most recent data on known inter- and intra-isotope Feshbach resonances, we show that Born-Oppenheimer corrections can be determined from atomic collisional properties alone and that significant differences between the homo- and heteronuclear case appear.