Energy Dependence of Scattering Ground State Polar Molecules

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electric fields influence the scattering behavior of ground state polar molecules like RbCs and RbK, revealing the importance of dipolar interactions and providing an efficient way to compute total cross sections at low energies.

Contribution

It introduces an accurate approximate method for calculating total cross sections of polar molecules under electric fields, accounting for multiple partial waves and low-field temperature dependence.

Findings

Dipolar interactions induce non-zero partial waves at low energies.

The approximate cross section method improves computational efficiency.

Scattering behavior can be characterized by electric field and collision energy.

Abstract

We explore the total cross section of ground state polar molecules in an electric field at various energies, focusing on RbCs and RbK. An external electric field polarizes the molecules and induces strong dipolar interactions leading to non-zero partial waves contributing to the scattering even as the collision energy goes to zero. This results in the need to compute scattering problems with many different values of total M to converge the total cross section. An accurate and efficient approximate total cross section is introduced and used to study the low field temperature dependence. To understand the scattering of the polar molecules we compare a semi-classical cross section with quantum unitarity limit. This comparison leads to the ability to characterize the scattering based on the value of the electric field and the collision energy.