Radiative collisional heating at the Doppler limit for laser-cooled magnesium atoms

We report Monte Carlo wave function simulation results on cold collisions between magnesium atoms in a strong red-detuned laser field. This is the normal situation e.g. in magneto-optical traps (MOT). The Doppler limit heating rate due to radiative collisions is calculated for Mg-24 atoms in a magneto-optical trap based on the singlet S_0 - singlet P_1 atomic laser cooling transition. We find that radiative heating does not seem to affect the Doppler limit in this case. We also describe a channelling mechanism due to the missing Q branch in the excitation scheme, which could lead to a suppression of inelastic collisions, and find that this mechanism is not present in our simulation results due to the multistate character of the excitation process.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX 4; v2 contains minor revisions based on referee comments (5 pages

Scattering length of the ground state Mg+Mg collision

We have constructed the X 1SIGMAg+ potential for the collision between two ground state Mg atoms and analyzed the effect of uncertainties in the shape of the potential on scattering properties at ultra-cold temperatures. This potential reproduces the experimental term values to 0.2 inverse cm and has a scattering length of +1.4(5) nm where the error is prodominantly due to the uncertainty in the dissociation energy and the C6 dispersion coefficient. A positive sign of the scattering length suggests that a Bose-Einstein condensate of ground state Mg atoms is stable.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, Submitted Phys. Rev.

Theoretical study of the

Excitation spectra arising from $A^30^+ \leftarrow X^10^+$ and $B^31 \leftarrow X^10^+$ electronic transitions in the Cd-rare gas (RG) van der Waals molecules are calculated using newly obtained theoretical potential curves for these species. In the molecular structure calculations, Cd20+ and RG8+ cores are simulated by energy-consistent pseudopotentials which also account for scalar-relativistic effects and spin-orbit (SO) interaction within the valence shell. Potential energies in the $\Lambda S$ coupling scheme have been obtained by means of ab initio complete-active-space multiconfiguration self consistent-field (CASSCF)/complete-active-space multireference second-order perturbation theory (CASPT2) calculations with a total 28 correlated electrons, while the SO matrix has been computed in a reduced CI space restricted to the CASSCF level. The final Ω potential curves are obtained by diagonalization of the modified SO matrix (its diagonal elements before diagonalization substituted for the corresponding CASPT2 eigen-energies). The spectroscopic parameters for the ground and several excited states of the Cd-RG complexes deduced from the calculated potential curves are in quite reasonable agreement with available experimental data. In addition, the radial Schrödinger equation for nuclear motion was solved numerically with the calculated potentials to evaluate the corresponding vibrational levels and radial wavefunctions. The latter have been used in the calculation of the appropriate Franck-Condon factors to yield information on relative intensities of the vibrational bands of the Cd-RG complexes. The theoretical vibrational progressions are discussed in the context of experimental spectra