Hamburg 2009 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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A: Fachverband Atomphysik
A 19: Ultracold atoms III: Manipulation and detection / Rydbergatoms (with Q)
A 19.6: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 4. März 2009, 17:45–18:00, Audi-B
Coherent excitation of ultra-long-range Rydberg molecules — •Björn Butscher1, Vera Bendkowsky1, Johannes Nipper1, Jonathan Balewski1, James Shaffer1,2, Robert Löw1, and Tilman Pfau1 — 15. Physikalisches Institut, Universität Stuttgart, Deutschland — 2Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Oklahoma, USA
At ultralow temperatures - in so-called frozen Rydberg gases - the scattering of the Rydberg electron and a nearby polarizable ground state atom can generate an attractive potential due to the negative scattering length which is able to bind the ground state atom to the Rydberg atom at a well localized position within the Rydberg electron wave function. The resulting giant molecules can have an internuclear separation of several thousand Bohr radii, which places them among the largest known molecules to date.
Here we present spectroscopic data on the observation of vibrational ground and first excited state of Rubidium dimers Rb(5S)-Rb(nS). We apply a Born-Oppenheimer model to explain the measured binding energies for principal quantum numbers n between 34 and 40 and extract the s-wave scattering length for electron-Rb(5S) scattering in the relevant low energy regime Ekin < 100 meV. We also determine the lifetimes and the polarizabilities of these molecules [arXiv:0809.2961].
Additionally, we report on the observation of trimer states, where two ground state atoms are bound by a Rydberg atom.