Browsing by Author "Hill, J.C."

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    Photoassociative spectroscopy of a halo molecule in 86Sr
    (American Physical Society, 2018) Aman, J.A.; Hill, J.C.; Ding, R.; Hazzard, Kaden R.A.; Killian, T.C.; Kon, W.Y.
    We present two-photon photoassociation to the least-bound vibrational level of the X1Σ+g electronic ground state of the 86Sr2 dimer and measure a binding energy of Eb=−83.00(7)(20)kHz. Because of the very small binding energy, this is a halo state corresponding to the scattering resonance for two 86Sr atoms at low temperature. The measured binding energy, combined with universal theory for a very weakly bound state on a potential that asymptotes to a van der Waals form, is used to determine an s-wave scattering length a=810.6(3)(9)a0, which is consistent with, but substantially more accurate than, the previously determined a=798(12)a0 found from mass scaling and precision spectroscopy of other Sr isotopes. For the intermediate state, we use a bound level on the metastable 1S0−3P1 potential. Large sensitivity of the dimer binding energy to light near resonant with the bound-bound transition to the intermediate state suggests that 86Sr has great promise for manipulating atom interactions optically and probing naturally occurring Efimov states.