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Molecular Physics

Binding He atoms to hydrogen moieties: quantum features from ultraweak interactions

Sergio Orlandini, Emanuele Coccia, I. Baccarelli, Franco Antonio Gianturco, Eduardo Garrido, Tomás González‐Lezana, Gerardo Delgado-Barrio, Pablo Villarreal

Published Jan 10, 2010• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The possible existence of bound states in small helium clusters containing atomic and molecular hydrogen has been investigated by means of three completely independent sets of calculations. The first set employs the Jacobi–Davidson filtering procedure recently implemented in the Distributed Gaussian Functions (DGF) approach, the second one is based on the solution of the Faddeev equation by means of the hyperspherical adiabatic expansion method and the third follows the Quantum Monte Carlo approach. The partners within each complex are taken to interact via two-body potentials chosen among the most accurate existing in the literature. All the present quantum treatments show that no bound states are found for H(4He)2 and for D(4He)2 while only one very diffuse bound state is present in T(4He)2, where H, D and T are the three isotopes of hydrogen. The substitution of the atomic dopant with its molecular counterpart, H2, also gives rise to only one bound state whose spatial attributes are reported and analysed, underlining again the ultraweak nature of the interaction forces and the need to implement highly specific tools for the investigation of the ensuing bound states.

DOI
10.1080/00268970903496660

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•Jun 18, 2007•3 citations
The possible existence of bound states in small helium clusters containing atomic and molecular hydrogen has been investigated by means of three completely independent sets of calculations. The first set employs the Jacobi–Davidson filtering procedure recently implemented in the Distributed Gaussian Functions (DGF) approach, the second one is based on the solution of the Faddeev equation by means of the hyperspherical adiabatic expansion method and the third follows the Quantum Monte Carlo approach. The partners within each complex are taken to interact via two-body potentials chosen among the most accurate existing in the literature. All the present quantum treatments show that no bound states are found for H(4He)2 and for D(4He)2 while only one very diffuse bound state is present in T(4He)2, where H, D and T are the three isotopes of hydrogen. The substitution of the atomic dopant with its molecular counterpart, H2, also gives rise to only one bound state whose spatial attributes are reported and analysed, underlining again the ultraweak nature of the interaction forces and the need to implement highly specific tools for the investigation of the ensuing bound states.
The interactions between alkali atoms and 4 He, as well as those between H - and 4 He, are known to be even weaker than those between two helium atoms. In this work we show that when the three-particle potential energy surface is obtained as a sum of two-body functions, the ensuing ground state configurations are indeed very weakly bound and acquire spatial shapes difficult to describe in simple configurational terms. We have employed the quantum diffusion Monte Carlo method to analyse the He 2 Li, He 2 Na and He 2 H - systems, for which possible molecular `shapes' are extracted from the final DMC distributions by defining within them conventional chemical structures with varying degree of `stiffness' attached to the nuclear positions.
We study the existence of stable bound states of triatomic molecules containing two helium atoms and one alkali atom X (X = Li, Na) and examine the dependence of their binding energies on the mass of the constituent atoms. The three-body systems are solved within the adiabatic approximation in hyperspherical coordinates using the He - He and He - X pair van der Waals interactions that are available in the literature. The binding energies of these systems are shown to be of less than 1 K for some isotope combinations. For the lighter isotopes it is shown that no bound states exist. We found no evidence of the existence of halo states or Efimov states for these systems.
Small helium (4He) clusters containing the lighter isotope He3 are studied by means of quantum Monte Carlo methods. Accurate ground state energies and structural properties are obtained using accurate trial wave functions and the Tang–Tonnies–Yiu (TTY) helium–helium pair potential. The dimer He4–3He is not bound; as well as the trimer He4He23. The smallest cluster containing He3 is He24He3 with a nonrigid structure having a marked linear contribution. Interestingly, this weakly bound system, with an energy one order of magnitude less than the He34 trimer, is able to bind another He3 atom, forming the tetramer He24He23, which shows the odd feature of having five out of six unbound pairs. In general, the substitution of a single He4 atom in a pure cluster with a He3 atom leads to an energetic destabilization, as the pair He4–3He is not bound. The isotopic impurity is found to perturb only weakly the distributions of the remaining He4 atoms, which retain the high floppiness already found in the pure clusters. As the number of atoms increases the isotopic impurity has the marked tendency to stay on the surface of the cluster. This behavior is consistent with the formation of the so-called “Andreev states” of a single He3 in liquid He4 helium and droplets, where the impurity tends to form single-particle states on the surface of the pure He4.
We report accurate ground state energies and structural properties for small clusters of 4He computed with the diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) method combined with high quality trial wave functions and using the recent analytical pair potential of Tang, Toennies, and Yiu [Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 1546 (1995)]. Calculations based on the older HFD-B(He) potential are reported for comparison. The clusters are found to be extremely floppy and to be characterized by very diffuse wave functions. The DMC results for 4He2 and 4He3 are in excellent agreement with other calculations using conventional methods. 4He3 is found to have a noticeable contribution from nearly linear geometries. The internal structure of the clusters is described by a three particle correlation function which reveals a significantly non-spherical internal cluster structure. The energies for all cluster sizes are found to be slightly higher than those obtained with the HFD-B(He) pair potential. Exploratory calculations on the helium trimer indicate that the effects of three body interactions do not exceed the uncertainty margin provided by different state of the art pair potentials.
The three-body Schrdinger equation is approximately solved in the hyperspherical coordinates and the binding energies of the three-body weakly bound systems are calculated with the purpose to find if He-He-Ba trimers could exist. Using the special feature of the B-spline function like the flexible and highly localized properties, hypersphercial potentials are obtained by modifying the knots distribution of the B-spline basis of different weakly bound three-atom systems. Employing the best empirical interaction potentials between each pair of particles, we obtain that in the ground state binding energies of the weakly bound typical three-atom systems, the bindings of the molecules, 4He-4He-138Ba, 4He-3He-138Ba and 3He-3He-138Ba are possible. The binding energies of these systems are shown in the order of 1 Kelvin, each system could support only one bound state. These weakly bound molecules can exist only in a very cold environment. To get insight into the geometry of the molecules, the features of the channel functions associated with the hyperspherical potential curves of each system are investigated.
Abstract Small helium clusters Hen (n = 2, 3, ... , 10) in molecular beams produced by supersonic expansion of gaseous helium have been observed in several different experiments. Among these clusters the dimer, which has a single very slightly bound state, and the trimer, which could have many bound states, have especially unusual properties which QMC calculations can explain in detail. In this paper, diffusion QMC calculations were used to determine ground state properties for clusters (n = 2, ... , 10) using two accurate, but slightly different pairwise-additive potential energy expressions, a perturbation-based potential by Tang et al.a and an empirical potential (HFD-B) proposed by Aziz et al.b Trial functions for importance sampling were based on those determined earlier by Rick et alc. Expectation values and probability distributions were determined by the descendent-weighting technique to give results independent of the trial functions. As expected, a single bound state of the dimer was found, and its average internuclear distance was predicted to be 51.5 A. Energies for clusters with n = 2, 7 with the HFD-B potential were in good agreement with those of earlier calculations. Comparisons of the results for the two different potential energy expressions showed energies differing by a few percent. Tests of possible nonadditive interactions showed these to be far less important in their effects on predicted energies.