Creation and observation of a ghost trilobite chemical bond

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how to engineer and observe a ghost trilobite chemical bond, a long-range electron orbital resembling a fossil trilobite, using electric and magnetic field pulses, even without a second atom present.

Contribution

It introduces a method to coherently create and observe ghost trilobite orbitals through field pulses, expanding understanding of ultra-long-range chemical bonds.

Findings

Successfully engineered ghost trilobite orbitals with field pulses

Proposed multiple methods for observing the ghost chemical bond

Showed the bond's existence is due to high degeneracy and electron distribution

Abstract

The "trilobite" type of molecule, predicted in 2000 and observed experimentally in 2015, arises when a Rydberg electron exerts a weak attractive force on a neutral ground state atom. Such molecules have bond lengths exceeding 100 nm. The ultra-long-range chemical bond between the two atoms is a nonperturbative linear combination of the many degenerate electronic states associated with high principal quantum numbers, and the resulting electron probability distribution closely resembles a fossil trilobite from antiquity. We show how to coherently engineer this same long-range orbital through a sequence of electric and magnetic field pulses even when the ground state atom is not present, and propose several methods to observe the resulting orbital. The existence of such a ghost chemical bond in which an electron reaches out from one atom to a nonexistent second atom is a consequence of the high level degeneracy.