Hannover 2013 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 23: Quantum gases: Interaction effects II
Q 23.5: Vortrag
Dienstag, 19. März 2013, 12:15–12:30, E 001
Ionizing collisions of metastable neon in different spin states — •Jan Schütz, Alexander Martin, Sanah Altenburg, and Gerhard Birkl — Institut für Angewandte Physik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Schlossgartenstraße 7, 64289 Darmstadt
Metastable rare-gas atoms (Rg*) prepared by laser cooling techniques present a unique class of atoms for the investigation of cold and ultracold collisions. The extremely low kinetic energy (≈ 10−10 eV) of the laser-cooled atoms stands in strong contrast to the high internal energy (≈ 15 eV) of the metastable state which enables Penning and associative ionizing collisions. For unpolarized Rg* samples, these collisions lead to two-body loss rate coefficients up to 10−9 cm3/s. Spin polarizing the atoms to a spin-stretched state suppresses the ionizing collisions. The amount of suppression, however, depends crucially on the details of the interaction.
We perform detailed investigations on the collisions of Ne*. To gain closer insight into the details of the suppression mechanisms, we investigate ionizing collisions for Ne* prepared in the individual mj=+2,+1, and 0 sublevels of the metastable 3P2 state and controllable mixtures of all five mj-states. We apply two techniques, one based on RF induced Rabi oscillations and one based on STIRAP, to prepare the states. We present the resulting rate coefficients for the two bosonic isotopes 20Ne and 22Ne.