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Journal of Physics B Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics

The helium trimer has no bound rotational excited states

Teck-Ghee Lee, Brett D. Esry, Bingcong Gou, C. D. Lin

Published Mar 22, 2001• 21 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have searched for bound states of helium trimers with nonzero angular momenta. Including only pair interactions between helium atoms, we solved the Schrödinger equation in hyperspherical coordinates in the adiabatic approximation. From the resulting potential curves - which are mostly repulsive for nonzero angular momenta - we conclude that there are no bound rotational excited states in any of the isotopes of the helium trimer. The symmetry properties of the trimer wavefunctions in the body-fixed frame are also analysed.

DOI
10.1088/0953-4075/34/7/101

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We have searched for bound states of helium trimers with nonzero angular momenta. Including only pair interactions between helium atoms, we solved the Schrödinger equation in hyperspherical coordinates in the adiabatic approximation. From the resulting potential curves - which are mostly repulsive for nonzero angular momenta - we conclude that there are no bound rotational excited states in any of the isotopes of the helium trimer. The symmetry properties of the trimer wavefunctions in the body-fixed frame are also analysed.
Abstract The bound rotational excited states of weakly bound 4He23He and 3He24He molecules have been searched for. Including pair interaction between helium atoms, we solved the Schrödinger equation for the triatomic systems with hyperspherical coordinates in the adiabatic approximation. The resulting potential curves are mostly repulsive for nonzero angular momenta. We conclude that no bound rotational excited states exist in both 4He23He and 3He24He molecules. The stability of the systems depends sensitively on the quantum symmetry and the masses of the particles. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2005
The adiabatic hyperspherical method is used to investigate the spectrum of the helium trimer and to explore effects on the spectrum of varying the helium masses as well as the interaction strength. When a realistic helium dimer potential is adopted, only two isotopic combinations are observed to have three-body bound states: 4He3^{4}\mathrm{He}_{3}4He3​ and 4He23^{4}\mathrm{He}_{2}^{3}4He23​He. By artificially adjusting the dimer potential, we also determine the range of interaction strengths for which halo states can result. The existence of Efimov states for both physical and unphysical systems is also examined. \textcopyright{} 1996 American Institute of Physics.
Helium trimer bound states are calculated with a variational method described in terms of pair atom coordinates and distributed Gaussian functions by assuming zero total angular momentum. With the two-body interaction potential used, a weakly bound state for the dimer and only two bound states for the trimer are found. Although strictly speaking the first excited trimer state is not an Efimov state, we show that this state presents several characteristics of the Efimov behavior which are extensively discussed in the present work. Special emphasis is placed on the main geometrical configurations contributing to the two bound trimer states, and suggestions are made on the possible ways of experimentally detecting the Efimov-type state.
Abstract The structural properties of helium triatomic systems are studied using hyperspherical coordinates. A slow variable discretization approach is adopted to solve the three-body Schrödinger equation, in which the Schrödinger equation in hyperangular coordinates is solved using basis splines at a series of fixed FEM-DVR (finite-element methods–discrete variable representation) hyperradii. We focus on studying the geometrical structure of the 4 He 3 and 3 He 4 He 2 triatomic systems. Using the bound state wave functions obtained, we calculate and analyze the one-dimensional pair distribution and angle distribution functions as well as the two-dimensional angle–angle distributions. All these bound states are found to exhibit such a floppy nature that classifying them into particular geometrical shapes does not appear to be sensible. A comparison will be made with some bound states of the neon trimer, which are expected to be more tightly bound.
We search for the existence of weakly bound He-He-Be molecules. The He-He-Be molecule is treated as a three-body system. By using hyperspherical coordinates, the Schr\"odinger equation for the triatomic system is solved in the adiabatic approximation. A bound state is found for each of the $^{3}\mathrm{He}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{3}\mathrm{He}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{9}\mathrm{Be}$, $^{3}\mathrm{He}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{4}\mathrm{He}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{9}\mathrm{Be}$, and $^{4}\mathrm{He}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{4}\mathrm{He}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{9}\mathrm{Be}$ trimers.