Rydberg Molecule Created For the First Time

krou writes "The BBC is reporting that the Rydberg molecule has been formed from two atoms of rubidium. Proven in theory, this is the first time it's been created, reinforcing the fundamental quantum theories of Enrico Fermi. Chris Greene, the theoretical physicist who first predicted that the Rydberg molecules could exist, said: 'The Rydberg electron resembles a sheepdog that keeps its flock together by roaming speedily to the outermost periphery of the flock, and nudging back towards the centre any member that might begin to drift away.' It's a sheepdog with a very short life-span, however; the longest lived molecule only lasted 18 microseconds. Vera Bendkowsky, who led the research, explained how they created the molecule: 'The nuclei of the atoms have to be at the correct distance from each other for the electron fields to find each other and interact. We use an ultracold cloud of rubidium — as you cool it, the atoms in the gas move closer together. We excite the atoms to the Rydberg stage with a laser. If we have a gas at the critical density, with two atoms at the correct distance that are able to form the molecule, and we excite one to the Rydberg state, then we can form a molecule.'"

created on earth for the first time...

[gzipped_tar]

... but if I remember it correctly, Rydberg molecules have been found in interstellar clouds where both matter density and temperature are very low compared to on-Earth laboratory environments. In space, they are not subjected to frequent interaction with other atoms, which could easily destroy their fragile Rydberg states.

Re:What are the implications of this discovery?

[mhall119]

I'm not real sure of the implications, but after reading the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], it seems that this kind of molecule may behave more like a single atom with two nuclei than a typical two-atom molecule. This may offer new confinement possibilities in fusion research, but I'm no physicist.

Re:What are the implications of this discovery?

[lgw]

Also, could someone with half a clue on this topic please update the Wikipedia article? At the moment it's an incomprehensible sack of crap. I'm quite curious what the significance of this is, as I'm sure are thousands of Slashdotters. [wikipedia.org]

Re:What are the implications of this discovery?

[Hurricane78]

I'm sure, there's a Wikipedia article about it. If not... Well, to me it looks like a Bose-Einstein condensate, but made of two whole atoms.
For those condensates, they use pretty much the same technique.

Re:TFA says "18 microseconds", not "18 seconds"

[Dahan]

It used to support Unicode, but apparently, due to people using control characters (RTL overrides and such [slashdot.org]) to do clever things, anything non-ASCII is now filtered or mangled. Too bad they went overboard--seems like the easy way to fix this would be to only filter out control characters. Unicode publishes a handy database [unicode.org] that you can use to find out which characters are control characters.

Re:TFA says "18 microseconds", not "18 seconds"

[Noren]

Well, but this is a chemical experiment, though the physics aspects are certainly interesting. Of course, all chemistry is physics but not all physics is chemistry.

18 microseconds is on the short lived side for chemistry. On the other hand, The time that it takes a chemical bond to form or break is typically measured in femtoseconds, so this is long enough to demonstrate that it lasts several orders of magnitude longer than just a random chance approach of unbonded atoms.