Vibrationally highly excited trilobite molecules stabilized by non-adiabatic coupling

2025/02/21 by Srikumar, Rohan, Exner, Markus, Blättner, Richard +3
#Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.15509

Abstract

We report on the observation of highly excited (ν∼ 100) vibrational states of a trilobite ultralong-range Rydberg molecule in ⁸⁷Rb. These states manifest spectroscopically in a regularly spaced series of peaks red-detuned from the 25f_7/2 dissociation threshold. The existence and observed stability of these states requires the almost complete suppression of the adiabatic decay pathway induced by the P-wave shape resonance of Rb. This stabilization is predicted to occur only for certain Rydberg levels where the avoided crossing between trilobite and P-wave dominated butterfly potential energy curves nearly vanishes, allowing the vibrational states to diabatically traverse the crossing with almost unit probability. This is the first direct measurement of beyond-Born-Oppenheimer physics in long-range Rydberg molecules, and paves the way for future experiments to access and manipulate wavepackets formed from high-lying vibrational states.

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