Collisional Quenching at Ultralow Energies Controlling Efficiency with Internal State Selec.pdf

COLLISIONAL QUENCHING AT ULTRALOW ENERGIES: CONTROLLING EFFICIENCY WITH INTERNAL STATE SELECTION S. Bovino, E. Bodo and F.A. Gianturco? Department of Chemistry and CNISM, University of Rome La Sapienza, Piazzale A. Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy Abstract Calculations have been carried out for the vibrational quenching of excited H2 molecules which collide with Li+ ions at ultralow energies. The dynamics has been treated exactly using the well known quantum coupled-channel expansions over different initial vibrational levels. The overall interaction potential has been obtained from the calculations carried out earlier in our group using highly correlated ab initio methods. The results indicate that specific features of the scattering observables, e.g. the appearance of Ramsauer-Townsend minima in elastic channel cross sections and the marked increase of the cooling rates from specific initial states, can be linked to potential properties at vanishing energies ( sign and size of scattering lengths) and to the presence of either virtual states or bound states. The suggestion is made that by selecting the initial state prepara- tion of the molecular partners, the ionic interactions would be amenable to controlling quenching efficiency at ultralow energies. ? Corresponding author; e.mail address: fa.gianturco@caspur.it; fax: +39.06 1 a r X i v : 0 7 1 0 .4 8 9 2 v 1 [ p h y s i c s .c h e m - p h ] 2 5 O c t 2 0 0 7 I. INTRODUCTION Manipulation of atomic and molecular systems at ultralow energies has completely changed the research landscape of experimental and theoretical molecular phenomena. Thus, intense efforts have been directed to the study of new properties of Bose-Einstein conden- sates [1, 2] and to analyze the quantum degeneracy features of Fermi gases like 40K [3] and 6Li [4], since ultracold quantum matter containing fermions has exhibited a new range of un- expected properties. The occurrence of Bose-Einstein condensation and of Fermi degeneracy