2010/07/15 by Zbigniew Idziaszek, Goulven Quéméner, John L. Bohn +1 · 74 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Chemical polarity #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Molecule #Physics #Polar #Quantum #Quantum mechanics #Simple (philosophy) #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #cond-mat.quant-gas #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.82.020703
published in Physical Review A 82(2) (American Physical Society)
arxiv created 2010/07/15 · openalex publication_date 2010/08/31 · arxiv updated 2015/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present a unified formalism for describing chemical reaction rates of trapped, ultracold molecules. This formalism reduces the scattering to its essential features, namely, a propagation of the reactant molecules through a gauntlet of long-range forces before they ultimately encounter one another, followed by a probability for the reaction to occur once they do. In this way, the electric-field dependence should be readily parametrized in terms of a pair of fitting parameters (along with a C6 coefficient) for each asymptotic value of partial-wave quantum numbers |L,ML\ensuremath⟩. From this, the electric-field dependence of the collision rates follows automatically. We present examples for reactive species, such as KRb, and nonreactive species, such as RbCs.