Hyperfine energy levels of alkali-metal dimers: Ground-state homonuclear molecules in magnetic fields

Aldegunde, J.; Hutson, Jeremy M.

Abstract

We investigate the hyperfine energy levels and Zeeman splittings for homonuclear alkali-metal dimers in low-lying rotational and vibrational states, which are important for experiments designed to produce quantum gases of deeply bound molecules. We carry out density-functional theory calculations of the nuclear hyperfine coupling constants. For nonrotating states, the zero-field splittings are determined almost entirely by the scalar nuclear spin-spin coupling constant. By contrast with the heteronuclear case, the total nuclear spin remains a good quantum number in a magnetic field. We also investigate levels with rotational quantum number N=1, which have long-range anisotropic quadrupole-quadrupole interactions and may be collisionally stable. For these states the splitting is dominated by nuclear quadrupole coupling for most of the alkali-metal dimers and the Zeeman splittings are considerably more complicated.

Citation

Aldegunde, J., & Hutson, J. M. (2009). Hyperfine energy levels of alkali-metal dimers: Ground-state homonuclear molecules in magnetic fields. Physical Review A, 79(1), Article 013401. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.79.013401

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2009
• Deposit Date: Jun 19, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 12, 2013
• Journal: Physical Review A
• Print ISSN: 1050-2947
• Electronic ISSN: 1094-1622
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 79
• Issue: 1
• Article Number: 013401
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.79.013401