Creation and observation of a ghost trilobite chemical bond
Abstract
The "trilobite" type of molecule, predicted in 2000 and observed experimentally in 2015, arises when a Rydberg electron exerts a weak attractive force on a neutral ground state atom. Such molecules have bond lengths exceeding 100 nm. The ultra-long-range chemical bond between the two atoms is a nonperturbative linear combination of the many degenerate electronic states associated with high principal quantum numbers, and the resulting electron probability distribution closely resembles a fossil trilobite from antiquity. We show how to coherently engineer this same long-range orbital through a sequence of electric and magnetic field pulses even when the ground state atom is not present, and propose several methods to observe the resulting orbital. The existence of such a ghost chemical bond in which an electron reaches out from one atom to a nonexistent second atom is a consequence of the high level degeneracy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1806.02963,
title = {Creation and observation of a ghost trilobite chemical bond},
author = {Matthew T. Eiles and Zhengjia Tong and Chris H. Greene},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.02963},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures, and 7 pages of supplementary information with 2 figures and 1 table