Collisional phenomena involving rydberg atoms

Abstract

The theory of collisions of Rydberg atoms with rare-gas atoms at thermal energies is reviewed. A central feature of the analysis is that the interaction of a highly excited atom with a perturber may be viewed as the scattering of the active electron from the perturber. Therefore, the low-energy electron-scattering amplitude plays a crucial role in the formulation of the problem. In the field-free regime, the transitions considered are between different angular momentum states belonging to the same principal quantum number n. The generalization of the theory to the case of a weak, static electric field is also presented. In this case, the appropriate initial and final states arc Stark states. The transition from zero field to weak field is discussed, and numerical results are presented that illustrate several important effects.