Tuning ultracold chemical reactions via Rydberg-dressed interactions.

We show that ultracold chemical reactions with an activation barrier can be tuned using Rydberg-dressed interactions. Scattering in the ultracold regime is sensitive to long-range interactions, especially when weakly bound (or quasibound) states exist near the collision threshold. We investigate how, by Rydberg dressing a reactant, one enhances its polarizability and modifies the long-range van der Waals collision complex, which can alter chemical reaction rates by shifting the position of near-threshold bound states. We carry out a full quantum mechanical scattering calculation for the benchmark system H(2)+D, and show that resonances can be moved substantially and that rate coefficients at cold and ultracold temperatures can be increased by several orders of magnitude.

A case study in ultracold reactive scattering: D + H2.

We report theoretical results for reaction and vibrational quenching of the ultracold collision D + H(2) (v, j = 0) for a wide range of initial vibrationally excited states v. The v-dependence of the zero-temperature limit of the reaction rate coefficient shows two distinct regimes: a barrier dominated regime for 0 ≤ v ≤ 4, and a barrierless regime for v ≥ 5. We also present detailed distributions over the rovibrational states of the products. We find an approximate conservation of the internal vibrational energy; namely, the branching ratios always favor the highly excited final states, which have vibrational energies similar to that of the entrance channel.