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arXiv:2308.02692 · Physical Review A

Green's-function treatment of Rydberg molecules with spins

Chris H. Greene, Matthew T. Eiles

Published Oct 11, 2023• 14 citations
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Abstract

The authors present a method based on the Coulomb Green's function to derive the electronic structure of ultra-long-range Rydberg molecules including spins, providing a promising alternative to the standard method based on basis-set expansion, which was shown to have serious convergence problems. Use of this approach should enable more accurate studies of Rydberg-molecule spectra and the electron-atom scattering phase shifts upon which they depend.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.108.042805

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•Jan 1, 2010•1 citation
The authors present a method based on the Coulomb Green's function to derive the electronic structure of ultra-long-range Rydberg molecules including spins, providing a promising alternative to the standard method based on basis-set expansion, which was shown to have serious convergence problems. Use of this approach should enable more accurate studies of Rydberg-molecule spectra and the electron-atom scattering phase shifts upon which they depend.
We perform a comparative analysis of different computational approaches employed to explore the electronic structure of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules. Employing the Fermi pseudopotential approach, where the interaction is approximated by an s -wave bare delta function potential, one encounters a non-convergent behavior in basis set diagonalization. Nevertheless, the energy shifts within the first order perturbation theory coincide with those obtained by an alternative approach relying on Green's function calculation with the quantum defect theory. A pseudopotential that yields exactly the results obtained with the quantum defect theory, i.e. beyond first order perturbation theory, is the regularized delta function potential. The origin of the discrepancies between the different approaches is analytically explained.
We calculate vibrational spectra of ultralong-range Cs(32p) Rydberg molecules which form in an ultracold gas of Cs atoms. We account for the partial-wave scattering of the Rydberg electrons from the ground Cs perturber atoms by including the full set of spin-resolved 1,3SJ{}^{1,3}S_J1,3SJ​ and 1,3PJ{}^{1,3}P_J1,3PJ​ scattering phase shifts, and allow for the mixing of singlet (S=0) and triplet (S=1) spin states through Rydberg electron spin-orbit and ground electron hyperfine interactions. Excellent agreement with observed data in Saßmannshausen et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 133201(2015)] in line positions and profiles is obtained. We also determine the spin-dependent permanent electric dipole moments for these molecules. This is the first such calculation of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules in which all of the relativistic contributions are accounted for.
We introduce a computational method developed for study of long-range molecular Rydberg states of such systems that can be approximated by two electrons in a model potential of the atomic cores. Only diatomic molecules are considered. The method is based on a two-electron RRR-matrix approach inside a sphere centered on one of the atoms. The wave function is then connected to a Coulomb region outside the sphere via a multichannel version of the Coulomb Green's function. This approach is put into a test by its application to a study of Rydberg states of the hydrogen molecule for internuclear distances RRR from 20 to 400 bohrs and energies corresponding to nnn from 3 to 22. The results are compared with previous quantum chemical calculations (lower quantum numbers nnn) and computations based on contact-potential models (higher quantum numbers nnn).
An operator that generates an approximate symmetry of long-range Rydberg molecules (LRRMs) formed by two alkali atoms, one in a Rydberg state and the other in the ground state, is identified. This is first done by evaluating the natural orbitals associated with a variational calculation of the binding wave function within the Born-Oppenheimer description of the molecule including s and p Fermi pseudopotential and the hyperfine structure energy terms. The resulting orbitals with the highest occupation number are shown to be identical to those obtained by a perturbative model for high angular momentum—trilobite and butterfly—LRRMs. Whenever the slight dependence of the quantum defects of the Rydberg electron on its total momentum j⃗=ℓ⃗+s⃗1 can be neglected, the symmetry operator of the high angular momentum LRRMs orbitals is identified as the sum of the spin of the Rydberg electron s⃗1 , spin of the valence electron s⃗2 , and the spin of nucleus i⃗ of the ground-state atom, N⃗=s1⃗+s2⃗+i⃗ . The spin orbitals that diagonalize N⃗ define compact basis sets for the description of LRRMs beyond the aforementioned approximations. The matrix elements of the Hamiltonian in these basis sets have simple expressions, so that the relevance of triplet and singlet contributions can be directly estimated. The expected consequences of this approximate spin-symmetry on the spectra of LRRMs are briefly described. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We present results for many-body perturbation theory for the one-body Green's function at finite temperatures using the Matsubara formalism. Our method relies on the accurate representation of the single-particle states in standard Gaussian basis sets, allowing to efficiently compute, among other observables, quasiparticle energies and Dyson orbitals of atoms and molecules. In particular, we challenge the second-order treatment of the Coulomb interaction by benchmarking its accuracy for a well-established test set of small molecules, which includes also systems where the usual Hartree-Fock treatment encounters difficulties. We discuss different schemes how to extract quasiparticle properties and assess their range of applicability. With an accurate solution and compact representation, our method is an ideal starting point to study electron dynamics in time-resolved experiments by the propagation of the Kadanoff-Baym equations.
In this work the existence of a novel type of molecule is shown whose binding is based solely on electron-atom scattering. These molecules are composed of a Rydberg atom and a ground state atom - here Rb(ns) and Rb(5s) - where the binding arises from scattering of the Rydberg electron from the ground state atom. The ground state atom is bound to the Rydberg wavefunction, which has radii on the order of 100nm, and thus these molecules are of long-range. Although the theoretical description of this interaction goes back to the famous work of Fermi in the year 1934 which was expanded in the following decades by Omont and Greene, the experimental proof of their existence was still missing. Up to now, experimental evidence for the ultralong-range Rydberg molecules was found only in spectral line broadenings. The present experiments have demonstrated the direct photoassociation of these ultralong-range Rydberg molecules for Rb(ns)-Rb(5s) triplet states from a cold and dense sample of rubidium 87 atoms for a range of principal quantum numbers, n, between 34 and 40. The high-resolution photoassociation spectra allowed for the observation of several vibrational states separated by only a few Megahertz. Based on the model by Greene the vibrational ground states v=0 are assigned and the dependence of their binding energy on the principal quantum number, n, is used to extract the triplet s-wave scattering length for electron-Rb(5s) collisions from the data. The remarkably good agreement between experiment and theory for the vibrational ground state v=0 over a range of principal quantum numbers attests to the accuracy of Fermi's original pseudopotential approach in describing interactions in excited multi-atom systems. Aside from this good agreement for the state v=0, the measurements also show that contributions from p-wave scattering cannot be neglected, as a number of excited vibrational states is observed in the experiment that are not predicted from the theory assuming only s-wave scattering. Calculations of Li, Pohl and coworkers have shown that a full solution of the electron-atom scattering is necessary for the assignment of all vibrational states. This work finds the molecular bound states to be very sensitive to both s-wave as well as p-wave electron-atom scattering and the Rydberg molecules turn out to be an accurate experimental platform to study electron-atom collisions in a previously inaccessible ultralow-energy regime. In general, the ultralong-range Rydberg molecules investigated here for rubidium are expected for all species with negative scattering length for electron-atom interaction, e. g. the other alkali atoms. Rydberg atom and ground state atom do not even have to be of the same chemical element, the only requirement is a negative scattering length of the ground state atom for electron scattering. Moreover, the binding force of the Rydberg electron is not restricted to a single ground state atom and molecules with more than one ground state atom can be created. The fact that these exotic molecules have huge bond lengths but nevertheless a vibrational spectrum with several states make a new type of ultracold Rydberg chemistry feasible. In the future, larger polymers or even heteronuclear molecules can be realized, where the number of atoms, the constituent atomic elements and the addressed Rydberg state allow to precisely select the properties of the long-range molecule.