Dispersion coefficients for the interaction of inert gas atoms with alkali and alkaline earth ions and alkali atoms with their singly ionized ions

TL;DR

This paper calculates dispersion coefficients for inert gas and alkali/alkaline earth atom interactions using advanced relativistic methods, providing more accurate data for cold atom and ion collision studies.

Contribution

It introduces improved relativistic computational techniques to determine dispersion coefficients and polarizabilities, enhancing accuracy over previous data for atom-atom and atom-ion interactions.

Findings

More accurate dispersion coefficients than previous data

New results for previously unreported atom-ion systems

Enhanced understanding of low-temperature collisional physics

Abstract

We report the dispersion coefficients for the interacting inert gas atoms with the alkali ions, alkaline earth ions and alkali atoms with their singly charged ions. We use our relativistic coupled-cluster method to determine dynamic dipole and quadrupole polarizabilities of the alkali atoms and singly ionized alkaline earth atoms, whereas a relativistic random phase approximation approach has been adopted to evaluate these quantities for the closed-shell configured inert gas atoms and the singly and doubly ionized alkali and alkaline earth atoms, respectively. Accuracies of these results are adjudged from the comparison of their static polarizability values with their respective experimental results. These polarizabilities are further compared with the other theoretical results. Reason for the improvement in the accuracies of our estimated dispersion coefficients than the data listed in [At. Data and Nucl. Data Tables 101, 58 (2015)] are discussed. Results for some of the atom-ion interacting systems were not available earlier, these results and the other reported improved results will be very useful for the comprehensive understanding of the collisional physics involving these atom-atom and atom-ion interactions in the cold atom and atom-ion hybrid trapping experiments at the low-temperature regime.