Stopping molecular rotation using coherent ultra-low-energy magnetic manipulations.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 35484103.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-022-29830-3 and PMC identifier 9050693.
- 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
Rotational motion lies at the heart of intermolecular, molecule-surface chemistry and cold molecule science, motivating the development of methods to excite and de-excite rotations. Existing schemes involve perturbing the molecules with photons or electrons which supply or remove energy comparable to the rotational level spacing. Here, we study the possibility of de-exciting the molecular rotation of a D2 molecule, from J = 2 to the non-rotating J = 0 state, without using an energy-matched perturbation. We show that passing the beam through a 1 m long magnetic field, which splits the rotational projection states by only 10-12 eV, can change the probability that a molecule-surface collision will stop a molecule from rotating and lose rotational energy which is 9 orders larger than that of the magnetic manipulation. Calculations confirm that different rotational orientations have different de-excitation probabilities but underestimate rotational flips (∆mJ[Formula: see text]0), highlighting the importance of the results as a sensitive benchmark for further developing theoretical models of molecule-surface interactions.