Quantum interference in cold collisions has been predicted to dominate chemical dynamics at low temperatures. However, experimental observations have been largely confined to light-atom systems due to technical challenges. Here, we report direct observation of scattering oscillations in cold ionizing collisions between metastable krypton and rubidium atoms. By combining laser cooling with velocity-mapped ion imaging, we precisely controlled the collision energy from 15 millikelvin to 8 kelvin and detected the ionization products. Below 1 kelvin, pronounced quantum interference between partial waves emerges as the de Broglie wavelength approaches the interaction range. The angular oscillation period scales as θp∝E−1/3, consistent with a Langevin capture model for van der Waals–dominated collisions. Moreover, interference patterns in the angular distribution–collision temperature spectrum are highly sensitive to the long-range potential shape and reveal subtle shape resonances. These observations were corroborated by theoretical calculations. Our results demonstrate the quantum-classical crossover in heavy-atom systems. This study establishes a versatile platform for studying a wide range of laser-coolable species.
Although Mg+-He is a benchmark system for sympathetic cooling of trapped ions and for ionic mobility measurements, its collisional dynamics has never been characterized: previous studies addressed only the underlying electronic structure. We close this gap with a fully quantum-mechanical, partial-wave study of elastic...
S. Lias, Samira Louaifi Hamaili, K. Alioua· Physical Chemistry, Chemical...· 0 citations
Quantum wake dynamics in quantum magnets have recently been inferred from the dynamical spin structure factor, which probes only a restricted class of local perturbations. Here, we show that resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) selection rules act as an operator filter on fractionalized excitations, producing dis...
Umesh Kumar, Gonzalo Alvarez, D. A. Tennant et al.· 0 citations
The production of light nuclei in relativistic heavy-ion collisions provides valuable insights into the dynamics of the hot and dense matter created in these extreme environments. While stable light nuclei have been extensively studied, unstable light nuclei being short-lived resonance states remain largely unexplored...
Jun-Lin Wu, Hong-Chan Li, Ke Mi et al.· 0 citations
We propose a novel method to measure the strength and isospin dependence of short-range correlations (SRCs) in nuclei with their collisions at relativistic energies. Since nucleons in the high-momentum tail (HMT) induced by SRCs have large transverse velocities, we find that measuring the yield ratio of free spectator...
Inverse Compton sources --- in which a relativistic electron beam scatters a laser pulse to produce tunable, collimated, high-energy radiation --- have emerged as promising compact radiation sources, with applications in nuclear photonics, medical imaging, and nanoscale metrology. As laser intensities increase and elec...
Femtoscopic correlations are widely regarded as precision probes of hadronic interactions through vacuum final-state interactions after kinetic freeze-out. Here we demonstrate that, in baryon-rich heavy-ion collisions, the nuclear mean field generates an additional dynamical contribution to femtoscopic correlations dur...
Xia-Lei Jiang, Jia-Xing Zhao, Ying-Ying Zhou et al.· 0 citations
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