Feasibility of Cooling and Trapping Metastable Alkaline-Earth Atoms
نویسنده
چکیده
Metastability and long-range interactions of Mg, Ca, and Sr in the lowest-energy metastable P2 state are investigated. The calculated lifetimes are 38 min for Mg , 118 min for Ca , and 17 min for Sr , supporting feasibility of cooling and trapping experiments. The quadrupole-quadrupole long-range interactions of two metastable atoms are evaluated for various molecular symmetries. Hund’s case (c) 4g potential possesses a large 100–1000 K potential barrier. Therefore magnetic trap losses can possibly be reduced using cold metastable atoms in a stretched M 2 state. Calculations were performed in the framework of ab initio relativistic configuration interaction method coupled with the random-phase approximation.
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