Ultracold, radiative charge transfer in hybrid Yb ion - Rb atom traps

TL;DR

This paper investigates radiative charge transfer in ultracold Yb$^{+}$-Rb ion-atom traps using first-principles quantum chemistry, revealing the dominance of radiative decay mechanisms and aligning well with experimental data.

Contribution

The study provides detailed potential energy curves, dipole moments, and decay cross sections for Yb$^{+}$ and Rb, highlighting the importance of radiative processes in ultracold ion-atom collisions.

Findings

Radiative decay mechanisms dominate at low energies.

Quantum approach aligns with experimental charge transfer rates.

No strong isotope effects observed in the collision processes.

Abstract

Ultracold hybrid ion-atom traps offer the possibility of microscopic manipulation of quantum coherences in the gas using the ion as a probe. However, inelastic processes, particularly charge transfer can be a significant process of ion loss and has been measured experimentally for the Yb$^{+}$ ion immersed in a Rb vapour. We use first-principles quantum chemistry codes to obtain the potential energy curves and dipole moments for the lowest-lying energy states of this complex. Calculations for the radiative decay processes cross sections and rate coefficients are presented for the total decay processes. Comparing the semi-classical Langevin approximation with the quantum approach, we find it provides a very good estimate of the background at higher energies. The results demonstrate that radiative decay mechanisms are important over the energy and temperature region considered. In fact, the Langevin process of ion-atom collisions dominates cold ion-atom collisions. For spin dependent processes \cite{kohl13} the anisotropic magnetic dipole-dipole interaction and the second-order spin-orbit coupling can play important roles, inducing couplingbetween the spin and the orbital motion. They measured the spin-relaxing collision rate to be approximately 5 orders of magnitude higher than the charge-exchange collision rate \cite{kohl13}. Regarding the measured radiative charge transfer collision rate, we find that our calculation is in very good agreement with experiment and with previous calculations. Nonetheless, we find no broad resonances features that might underly a strong isotope effect. In conclusion, we find, in agreement with previous theory that the isotope anomaly observed in experiment remains an open question.