Scatterings, Reactions and Quantum Many-Body States in Ultracold Molecules

Modern quantum techniques have allowed scientists to prepare molecules in their ground states and cool these molecules down to a temperature regime of a few tens of nanokelvin. Such ultracold molecules offer scientists unprecedented opportunities to explore a vast range of quantum phenomena unattainable before. Ultracold molecules could form new quantum matter that has no counterparts in other systems, give rise to a new platform for studying quantum chemistry, and potentially serve as a new powerful apparatus to implement quantum information processing.

In all of these studies, a fundamental issue is to understand scatterings between molecules and how such scatterings determine the chemical reactions and the formation of novel quantum phases. Addressing this issue is the goal of this project.

This research will explore scatterings between molecules and study how these scatterings lead to quantum entanglement between different degrees of freedom and consequently the rise of novel topological quantum matter. The group will further implement the scatterings as a unique tool to manipulate two-body decays and will explore new universal relations for molecules with losses, which are inaccessible in closed systems.

These universal relations will allow the team to trace both the reaction rate and many-body correlations using contacts, the central quantity in dilute quantum systems. The outcome of this project will deliver new tools to control losses of ultracold molecules and provide guidance for experimentalists to search for novel superfluids and other quantum many-body phases.

Furthermore, it could bring the research of contacts and universal relations to a new domain of open quantum systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.