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The Journal of Chemical Physics

Perspective: Ultracold molecules and the dawn of cold controlled chemistry

N. Balakrishnan

Published Oct 17, 2016• 265 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Ultracold molecules offer unprecedented opportunities for the controlled interrogation of molecular events, including chemical reactivity in the ultimate quantum regime. The proliferation of methods to create, cool, and confine them has allowed the investigation of a diverse array of molecular systems and chemical reactions at temperatures where only a single partial wave contributes. Here we present a brief account of recent progress on the experimental and theoretical fronts on cold and ultracold molecules and the opportunities and challenges they provide for a fundamental understanding of bimolecular chemical reaction dynamics.

DOI
10.1063/1.4964096

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Ultracold molecules offer unprecedented opportunities for the controlled interrogation of molecular events, including chemical reactivity in the ultimate quantum regime. The proliferation of methods to create, cool, and confine them has allowed the investigation of a diverse array of molecular systems and chemical reactions at temperatures where only a single partial wave contributes. Here we present a brief account of recent progress on the experimental and theoretical fronts on cold and ultracold molecules and the opportunities and challenges they provide for a fundamental understanding of bimolecular chemical reaction dynamics.
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Recent years have seen tremendous progress in research on cold and controlled molecular collisions, both in theory and in experiment. The advent of techniques to prepare cold and ultracold molecules and ions, to store them in optical lattices or in charged quasicristalline structures, and to use them in crossed or merged beam experiments have opened many new possibilities to study the most fundamental aspects of molecular interactions. At the same time, theoretical work has made progress in tackling these problems and accurately describing quantum effects in complex systems, and in proposing viable options to control chemical reactions at ultralow energies. Through tutorials on both the theoretical and experimental aspects of research in cold and ultracold molecular collisions, this book provides advanced undergraduate students, graduate students and researchers with the foundations needed to understand this exciting field.
At temperatures close to absolute zero, the molecular reactions and collisions are dominantly governed by quantum mechanics. Remarkable quantum phenomena such as quantum tunneling, quantum threshold behavior, quantum resonances, quantum interference, and quantum statistics are expected to be the main features in ultracold reactions and collisions. Ultracold molecules offer great opportunities and challenges in the study of these intriguing quantum phenomena in molecular processes. In this article, we review the recent progress in the preparation of ultracold molecules and the study of ultracold reactions and collisions using ultracold molecules. We focus on the controlled ultracold chemistry and the scattering resonances at ultralow temperatures. The challenges in understanding the complex ultracold reactions and collisions are also discussed.
A diversity of experimental techniques has been developed over the last 25 years to create samples of molecular gases at temperatures close to the Absolute Zero—here we consider samples in the range from 10s of Kelvin (cold) down to 10s of nanoKelvin (ultracold). In these exotic physical environments, a range of novel experiments can be conducted which bring high levels of control over the properties of these ‘almost stationary’ molecules, in some cases with control over single trapped molecules achievable. In this article, recent advances in this field since 2020, both in terms of the ability to produce and manipulate the molecules and understand their properties, and also in the development of new applications of these technologies, are highlighted. Applications include observing explicit ‘quantum effects’ in chemical reactivity, developing an understanding of chemistry in cold astrophysical media, the creation of exotic phases of matter, the use of trapped molecules in quantum computation and simulations systems, and the use of very high-precision spectroscopic measurements to answer fundamental physics questions beyond the standard model of particle physics.
Over the past decade, and particularly the past five years, a quiet revolution has been building at the border between atomic physics and experimental quantum chemistry. The rapid development of techniques for producing cold and even ultracold molecules without a perturbing rare-gas cluster shell is now enabling the study of chemical reactions and scattering at the quantum scattering limit with only a few partial waves contributing to the incident channel. Moreover, the ability to perform these experiments with nonthermal distributions comprising one or a few specific states enables the observation and even full control of state-to-state collision rates in this computation-friendly regime: This is perhaps the most elementary study possible of scattering and reaction dynamics.
In the past two decades, the revolutionary technologies of creating cold and ultracold molecules have provided cutting-edge experiments for studying the fundamental phenomena of collision physics. To a large degree, the recent explosion of interest in the molecular collisions has been sparked by dramatic progress of experimental capabilities and theoretical methods, which permit molecular collisions to be explored deep in the quantum mechanical limit. Tremendous experimental advances in the field have already been achieved, and the authors, from an experimental perspective, provide a review of these studies for exploring the nature of molecular collisions occurring at temperatures ranging from the Kelvin to the nanoKelvin regime, as well as for applications of producing ultracold molecules.