State-to-state chemistry with ultracold Rb atoms
Prof. Dr. Johannes Hecker Denschlag (Institut für Quantenmaterie der Universität Ulm)

A chemical reaction is a complicated quantum mechanical process between two or more atoms. Already for three atoms a full description of the reaction dynamics is in general not yet fully theoretically tractable. In order to fully understand the reaction path for a given reactant’s quantum state, the final product quantum state has to be determined. I will talk about recent work of my group where we have discovered an experimental method for tracking the chemical reaction paths. In our lab we study three-body recombination of ultracold Rb atoms, where two atoms combine to form a Rb_2 molecule while the third atom carries away part of the released binding energy. In the experiment, we prepare the external and internal degrees of freedom of the reactants in a well-defined quantum state. After the reaction we state-selectively ionize the molecules with such high resolution that the different final quantum states can be distinguished. Our first results allow for extracting some simple propensity rules for the reaction paths.