Rostock 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 17: Ultra-cold plasmas and Rydberg systems (joint session A/Q)

A 17.3: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 13. März 2019, 14:30–14:45, S HS 1 Physik

Decay dynamics of P-state Rydberg molecules — •Tanita Eichert¹, Carsten Lippe¹, Oliver Thomas^1,2, Thomas Niederprüm¹, and Herwig Ott¹ — ¹Department of Physics and Research Center OPTIMAS, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany — ²Graduate School Materials Science in Mainz, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany

Rydberg molecules are formed when a ground state atom binds into the oscillatory potential resulting from a scattering interaction between this ground state atom and the highly excited electron of a Rydberg atom. The observation of different lifetimes characterizing each molecule gives reason to investigate the dynamics of Rydberg molecules as well as the relation between the lifetime and the bound state in a potential well. We use time-of-flight spectroscopy of different molecular states adiabatically connected to the Rubidium 25P-state to obtain time resolved ion signals representing the molecular decay. We describe the dynamics in a rate model and identify the different decay channels. From this we find that the molecule lifetimes are in addition to the decay processes of the atomic Rydberg state, determined by the tunneling process of the bound ground state atom to smaller internuclear distance. For different molecular states the tunneling rates range between 10kHz to beyond 1MHz. Since in our intuitive expectation the tunneling rate is connected to the binding depth in a potential well, the lifetime is reduced for high lying molecular states and similar to the atomic Rydberg state for molecules deeply bound in the potential well.