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Abstract
A fundamental question in the study of chemical reactions is how reactions proceed at a collision energy close to absolute zero. This question is no longer hypothetical: quantum degenerate gases of atoms and molecules can now be created at temperatures lower than a few tens of nanokelvin. Here we consider the benchmark ultracold reaction between, the most-celebrated ultracold molecule, KRb and K. We map out an accurate ab initio ground-state potential energy surface of the K2Rb complex in full dimensionality and report numerically-exact quantum-mechanical reaction dynamics. The distribution of rotationally resolved rates is shown to be Poissonian. An analysis of the hyperspherical adiabatic potential curves explains this statistical character revealing a chaotic distribution for the short-range collision complex that plays a key role in governing the reaction outcome.
Highlights
A fundamental question in the study of chemical reactions is how reactions proceed at a collision energy close to absolute zero
Ultracold chemistry is a new and rapidly progressing field where reactants are prepared in a single quantum state which holds out this promise[1,10,11,12]
We have studied the reaction dynamics along this potential surface and it is the focus of our electronic structure calculation
Summary
A fundamental question in the study of chemical reactions is how reactions proceed at a collision energy close to absolute zero. In addition many of the systems of current interest are heavy with deep potentials, meaning that scattering calculations need to include many channels with computational costs scaling with the cube of the number of channels It is for these reasons that while the pioneering experiments[1,13], on KRb reactions, were performed over 6 years ago no accompanying scattering calculations have been performed, until now. This chaotic character has been taken as the starting point for work examining statistical aspects of non-reactive ultracold alkali-metal dimer collisions[29,30] and ultracold resonance reactions[31] Such works suggest an approach to tackling ultracold reactions involving heavy alkali species avoiding the prohibitive computational cost of numerically exact calculations
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