Ab initio calculation of interaction potentials between two meta-stable Ne atoms
Abstract
A laser-cooled metastable Helium gas has been proposed as a good candidate for Bose-Einstein Condensation(G.V. Shlyapnikov, J.T.M. Walraven, U.M. Rahmanov, and M.W. Reynolds, Phys. Rev. Lett. 73), 3247 (1994).. Other metastable noble gases, such as Neon, might have similar expectations. However, no experimental or theoretical data about interaction potentials is available. This study is a first attempt to obtain the potentials for Neon. An ab-initio valence bond (VB) method is used to compute potential surfaces of two colliding metastable Ne + Ne^* atoms. The VB method is an attractive tool for collisional problems. It provides a physically realistic description of the separated atom limit for any atomic configuration. The present version of the method(S. Kotochigova and I. Tupitsyn, Int. J. Quant. Chem. 29), 307 (1995). is an all-electron-CI implementation using a nonorthogonal basis set of self-consistent atomic Hartree-Fock and Sturm's functions. We present various potentials of the Ne2 molecule that dissociate to the 2p^53s + 2p^53s metastable atomic limits.
- Publication:
-
APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- May 1998
- Bibcode:
- 1998APS..DMP..E209K