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Universal Dipolar Scattering paper published in PRL
April, 2008
Understanding and controlling the interactions of ultracold matter constitutes one of the most important goals in quantum atom optics,
especially, when seeking to understand the many body properties of an ultracold system. There is an increasingly urgent need to
understand the interactions of polar molecules as experimental progress rapidly proceeds toward the production of ultracold
molecular gases. Aiming to address this need, Dr. Christopher Ticknor (ACQAO at Swinburne) has studied
the scattering properties of ultracold polar molecules in the presence of an external electric field. The work shows that
there will be limited collisional control of polar molecules, especially in contrast to magnetic Feshbach resonances used in
ultracold atomic systems. The work further shows that when a strong dipolar system is rescaled, all dipolar systems will behave
similarly, dubbed universal dipolar scattering. The work illustrates universal dipolar scattering through numerous computational
scattering calculations, but also compares the scaling result to experimental scattering data in Rydberg atoms, and there is
remarkable agreement. This work has been published in Physical Review Letters and is entitled "Collisional Control of Ground
State Polar Molecules and Universal Dipolar Scattering”.
See this paper at
Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 133202 (2008)
and a previous paper at Phys Rev. A 76, 052703 (2007).
The figure shows thousands of scattering calculations transitioning from highly variable to uniform as the different dipolar
systems enter the universal dipolar scattering regime. Experimental Rydberg scattering data is shown as an inset with the same
scaling behaviour as the molecular scattering data.
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