Fig. 1: Adiabatic potential energy curves (PECs) of rubidium ULRMs in the vicinity of the 25P-state.
The annotations to the right denote the terms of the asymptotic free Rydberg states. Starting point of our studies is the preparation of rubidium ultralong-range Rydberg molecules (ULRMs), which are bound vibrational states supported by the outermost potential wells at internuclear distances of up to 1000 a0. The inset shows a zoom into the ultralong-range part of the potential energy landscape with a selection of vibrational wavefunctions (gray curves). Here, we specifically excite vibrational states near the atomic resonance as highlighted in red in the particular case of a 25P-ULRM. As time evolves, the ground state atom tunnels toward the ionic core (green arrows), following the R−4-interaction dominated PECs (blue shaded area) up to the region, where short-range molecular couplings are dominant. The red arrows indicate possible outcomes of a state-changing collision, where the release energy is translated into kinetic energy. Details of the calculation of such PECs are provided in the “Methods” section.
