On orientational relief of inter-molecular potential and the structure of domain walls in fullerite C60

A simple planar model for an orientational ordering of threefold molecules on a triangular lattice modelling a close-packed (111) plane of fullerite is considered. The system has 3-sublattice ordered ground state which includes 3 different molecular orientations. There exist 6 kinds of orientational domains, which are related with a permutation or a mirror symmetry. Interdomain walls are found to be rather narrow. The model molecules have two-well orientational potential profiles, which are slightly effected by a presence of a straight domain wall. The reason is a stronger correlation between neighbour molecules in triangular lattice versus previously considered square lattice A considerable reduction (up to one order) of orientational interwell potential barrier is found in the core regions of essentially two-dimentional potential defects, such as a three-domain boundary or a kink in the domain wall. For ultimately uncorrelated nearest neighbours the height of the interwell barrier can be reduced even by a factor of 100.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures, LaTeX, to appear in Low Temperature Physic

Low-temperature orientational order and possible domain structures in C(_{60}) fullerite

Based on a simple model for ordering of hexagons on square planar lattice, an attempt has been made to consider possible structure of C(_{60}) fullerite in its low temperature phase. It is shown that hexagons, imitating fullerens oriented along (C_{3}) axes of \emph{sc} lattice, can be ordered into an ideal structure with four non-equivalent molecules in unit cell. Then the energy degeneracy for each hexagon rotations by (\pi /3) around its (C_{3}) axis leaves the translational and orientational order in this structure, but leads to a random distribution of (\pi /3) rotations and hence to {}``averaged{}'' unit cell with two molecules. However the most relevant structural defects are not these intrinsic \char`\"{}misorientations\char`\"{} but certain walls between the domains with different sequencies of the above-mentioned two (non-ideal) sublattices. Numeric estimates have been made for the anisotropic inter-molecular potential showing that the anisotropy is noticeably smaller for molecules in walls than in domains

Efimov states in atom-molecular collisions

We analyse scattering of a heavy atom off a weakly bound molecule comprising an identical heavy and a light atom in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. We focus on the situation where the heavy atoms are bosons, which was realized in several experiments. The elastic and inelastic cross sections for the atom-molecular scattering exhibit a series of resonances corresponding to three-body Efimov states. Resonances in elastic collisions are accessible experimentally through thermalization rates, and thus constitute an alternative way of observing Efimov states.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure