Charge transfer in ultracold gases via Feshbach resonances

Abstract

We investigate the prospects of controlling charge-exchange in ultracold collisions of heteroisotopic combinations of atoms and ions of the same element. The treatment, readily applicable to alkali or alkanine-earth metals, is illustrated in the process $^9$Be$^{+}$ + $^{10}$Be $\leftrightarrow$ $^{9}$Be + $^{10}$Be$^{+}$, which exhibits favorable electronic, nuclear, and hyperfine structure. Feshbach resonances are obtained from quantum scattering calculations in a standard coupled-channel formalism with non-BO terms originating from the nuclear kinetic operator. Near a narrow resonance predicted at 322 G, we find the charge-exchange rate coefficient to rise from practically zero to values larger than $10^{-12}$ cm$^3$/s. Our results suggest controllable charge-exchange reactions between different isotopes of suitable atom-ion pairs with potential applications to quantum systems engineered to study charge diffusion in trapped cold atom-ion mixtures and emulate many-body physics.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; updated to match the published versio

Ultracold ion-atom experiments: cooling, chemistry, and quantum effects

“…the ion-atom scattering length a. Furthermore, swave Feshbach resonances (FRs) can then be used to tune the ion-atom interaction (Idziaszek et al, 2011;Gacesa and Côté, 2017;Tomza et al, 2015), in analogy to ultracold quantum gases where FRs are the workhorse of the field (Chin et al, 2010).…”

Bound states of an ultracold atom interacting with a set of stationary impurities

“…Hybrid systems of ultracold atoms and trapped impurities like ions [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] or Rydberg atoms [10,11] have been the subject of intense experimental and theoretical studies over the past years [12]. They have been proposed for quantum simulations [13][14][15], quantum computations [16][17][18], realization of new mesoscopic quantum states [19,20], probing quantum gases [21][22][23][24] or fundamental studies of low-energy collisions and molecular states [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. By tuning the geometric arrangement of the impurities, it is possible to simulate various solid-state and molecular systems [37][38][39][40].…”

Quantum reactive scattering in the long-range ion-dipole potential

“…On one hand, recent experiments have succeeded in combining ions confined in radio-frequency traps with ultracold atomic gases stored in optical potentials [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9], or producing charged particles directly in the ultracold gas via Rydberg excitation [10]. On the other hand, theoretical proposal have shown the relevance of such systems for a number of applications, ranging from implementation of quantum gates [11][12][13] and quantum simulations [14][15][16], realization of new mesoscopic quantum states [17,18], probing quantum gases [19][20][21][22] to fundamental studies of low-energy collisions and molecular states [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Much recent work has been focused on studying controlled chemical reactions at low temperatures in such systems [6,[35][36][37][38].…”