Bonn 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm
Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe
Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 28: Poster – Ultra-cold Plasmas and Rydberg Systems (joint session A/Q)
Q 28.4: Poster
Dienstag, 11. März 2025, 14:00–16:00, Tent
High precision spectroscopy of trilobite Rydberg molecular series — •Markus Exner1, Richard Blättner1, Rohan Srikumar2, Matt Eiles3, Peter Schmelcher2, and Herwig Ott1 — 1RPTU, Kaiserslautern — 2Zentrum für Optische Quantentechnologie, Hamburg — 3Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden
Trilobite Rydberg molecules consist of a highly excited Rydberg atom and a perturber atom in the electronic ground state. The underlying binding mechanism is based on the scattering interaction between the Rydberg electron and the perturber. These molecules exhibit extreme properties: their dipole moments are in the kilo-Debye range, and their molecular lifetimes may exceed the lifetimes of the close by atomic Rydberg states. We use three-photon photoassociation and a reaction microscope to perform momentum-resolved spectroscopy on trilobite 87Rb Rydberg molecules for principal quantum numbers n=22,24,25,26,27. The large binding energies and the high spectroscopic resolution of 10−4 allow us to benchmark theoretical models. Previous models relied on exact diagonalization, which suffered from basis-dependent convergence problems. Using a recent basis-independent theoretical method based on Green*s functions, which accounts for all relevant spin interactions, we fit the measured spectra. This enables a new estimate of the involved low-energy scattering lengths. However, with the precision of our experiment, we encounter conceptual issues, suggesting that the fundamental modeling of the molecular Hamiltonian has reached the limits of its predictive power.
Keywords: Rydberg physics; Rydberg molecules; Trilobite molecules; Recoil-ion momentum spectroscopy