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    Controlling the nature of a charged impurity in a bath of Feshbach dimers

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    We theoretically study the dynamics of a trapped ion that is immersed in an ultracold gas of weakly bound atomic dimers created by a Feshbach resonance. Using quasi-classical simulations, we find a crossover from dimer dissociation to molecular ion formation depending on the binding energy of the dimers. The location of the crossover strongly depends on the collision energy and the time-dependent fields of the Paul trap. Deeply bound dimers lead to fast molecular ion formation, with rates approaching the Langevin collision rate ΓL′≈4.8×10−9 \Gamma'_\text{L}\approx4.8\times10^{-9}\,cm3^3s−1^{-1}. The kinetic energies of the created molecular ions have a median below 1 1\,mK, such that they will stay confined in the ion trap. We conclude that interacting ions and Feshbach molecules may provide a novel approach towards the creation of ultracold molecular ions with applications in precision spectroscopy and quantum chemistry.Comment: 9 pages and 12 figures including appendice
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