Short-range photoassociation from the inner wall of the lowest triplet potential of 85Rb2

Abstract

Ultracold photoassociation is typically performed at large internuclear separations, where the scattering wavefunction amplitude is large and Franck–Condon overlap is maximized. Recently, work by this group and others on alkali-metal diatomics has shown that photoassociation can efficiently form molecules at short internuclear distance in both homonuclear and heteronuclear dimers. We propose that this short-range photoassociation is due to excitation near the wavefunction amplitude maximum at the inner wall of the lowest triplet potential. We show that Franck–Condon factors (FCFs) from the highest-energy bound state can almost precisely reproduce FCFs from a low-energy scattering state, and that both calculations match experimental data from the near-zero positive-energy scattering state with reasonable accuracy. We also show that the corresponding photoassociation from the inner wall of the ground-state singlet potential at much shorter internuclear distance is weaker and undetectable under our current experimental conditions. We predict from FCFs that the strongest of these weaker short-range photoassociation transitions are one order of magnitude below our current sensitivity.