Universality and chaoticity in ultracold K+KRb chemical reactions.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28722014.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms15897 and PMC identifier 5524979.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
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 K<sub>2</sub>Rb 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.