Erlangen 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 26: Ultracold Plasmas and Rydberg systems (joint session A/Q)

A 26.7: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 7. März 2018, 15:30–15:45, K 0.011

Pendular states of butterfly Rydberg molecules — •Carsten Lippe¹, Oliver Thomas^1,2, Tanita Eichert¹, and Herwig Ott¹ — ¹Department of Physics and research center OPTIMAS, University of Kaiserslautern — ²Graduate School Materials Science in Mainz, Staudingerweg 9, 55128 Mainz

Butterfly Rydberg molecules are a special class of Rydberg molecular states arising from a shape resonance in the p-wave scattering channel of a ground state atom and a Rydberg electron. They owe their name to the shape of the electronic wavefunction which resembles the shape of a butterfly.

We have performed high resolution photoassociation spectroscopy of uv-excited deeply bound butterfly Rydberg molecules of ⁸⁷Rb. We find states bound up to −50 GHz from the 25P_1/2, F=1 and 25P_1/2, F=2 state, corresponding to bond lengths of 50 a₀ to 500 a₀.

Due to strong admixture of high angular momentum states the butterfly Rydberg molecules feature giant permanent electric dipole moments of hundreds of Debye which allow us to resolve the rotational structure of the Rydberg molecules and observe pendular states. This enables an unprecedented degree of control over the orientation of dipolar molecules even in weak electric fields.

Furthermore, the identification of different structures of pendular state spectra which can be attributed to different total angular momentum projections helps to map the detected molecular bound states to the corresponding potential energy curves.