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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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