Credit: Ye Group/JILA
Shadows of atoms trapped in layers of a web of laser light, or an optical lattice, before they are paired into ultracold potassium-rubidium molecules. JILA researchers then used an electric field to precisely control molecular collisions and suppress chemical reactions that would otherwise occur within the layers.
Building on their newfound ability to induce molecules in ultracold gases to interact with each other over long distances, JILA researchers have used an electric “knob” to influence molecular collisions and dramatically raise or lower chemical reaction rates.
These super-chilly gases follow the seemingly counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics, featuring exact units, or quanta, of energy and often-exotic motions. Thus, the ability to control chemical reactions in stable quantum gases could enable the design of novel chemicals and gases, new platforms for quantum computers using molecules as information-rich qubits (quantum bits), and new tools for precision measurement such as molecular clocks.
The advance is described in the Dec. 11 issue of Science. JILA is jointly operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder.
“The molecular collisions in our experiment are very quantum mechanical, with their trajectories all quantized in terms of the way in which they can approach each other,” NIST/JILA Fellow Jun Ye said. “This is very different from a warm gas where molecules can approach each other randomly.”
The new work follows up on Ye’s many previous achievements with ultracold quantum gases. In particular, the advance builds on electric tunes chemical reaction rates quantum
