Journal Article

Universality and chaoticity in ultracold K+KRb chemical reactions

Croft, J. F. E., Kotochigova, S., Petrov, A., Balakrishnan, N., Makrides, C., Li, M., Kendrick, B. K.

2017

Overview

A fundamental question in the study of chemical reactions is how reactions proceed at a collision energy close to absolute zero. This question is no longer hypothetical: quantum degenerate gases of atoms and molecules can now be created at temperatures lower than a few tens of nanokelvin. Here we consider the benchmark ultracold reaction between, the most-celebrated ultracold molecule, KRb and K. We map out an accurate ab initio ground-state potential energy surface of the K 2 Rb complex in full dimensionality and report numerically-exact quantum-mechanical reaction dynamics. The distribution of rotationally resolved rates is shown to be Poissonian. An analysis of the hyperspherical adiabatic potential curves explains this statistical character revealing a chaotic distribution for the short-range collision complex that plays a key role in governing the reaction outcome. Studying chemical reactions near zero temperature in detail is challenging both in theory and practice. Here the authors report an explicit quantum mechanical study of the benchmark ultracold reaction between a K atom and a KRb molecule, important for future controlled chemistry experiments.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group,Nature Portfolio
• Subject: 119/118 / 639/766/36/1120 / 639/766/36/1125 / Absolute zero / Adiabatic / Adiabatic flow / Chemical reactions / Collision complexes / Collision dynamics / Gases / Humanities and Social Sciences / Inorganic and Physical Chemistry / INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY / multidisciplinary / Potential energy / Science / Science (multidisciplinary) / Ultracold chemistry, ultracold molecules, quantum reactive scattering