{"id":136840,"date":"2022-03-14T08:22:26","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T15:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/magnetic-fields-can-have-a-huge-impact-on-reactivity-of-ultracold-molecules"},"modified":"2022-03-14T08:22:26","modified_gmt":"2022-03-14T15:22:26","slug":"magnetic-fields-can-have-a-huge-impact-on-reactivity-of-ultracold-molecules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/magnetic-fields-can-have-a-huge-impact-on-reactivity-of-ultracold-molecules","title":{"rendered":"Magnetic fields can have a huge impact on reactivity of ultracold molecules"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/magnetic-fields-can-have-a-huge-impact-on-reactivity-of-ultracold-molecules.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Probability of a reaction occurring increases 100-fold and points to quantum control of chemistry.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>A new step towards quantum control of chemistry has been achieved by researchers in the US, who found that tuning the magnetic field applied to colliding ultracold molecules could alter the probability of them reacting or undergoing inelastic scattering a 100-fold.<sup>1<\/sup> The work could potentially prove useful for producing large ensembles of molecules in the same state and investigating their properties.<\/p>\n<p>At room temperature, the random thermal motion of atoms and molecules blurs the quantum nature of chemistry. In an ultracold regime, however, this thermal motion is stilled, revealing chemical interactions as quantum interference processes between matter waves. Remarkable phenomena have been seen in ultracold atomic gases, such as the creation of Bose\u2013Einstein condensates, in which atoms all enter the quantum ground state of a trap, allowing a macroscopic view of their quantum wavefunction. <a href=\"https:\/\/physics.mit.edu\/faculty\/wolfgang-ketterle\/\">Wolfgang Ketterle<\/a> at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose group performed the new research, shared the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/physics\/2001\/summary\/\">2001 physics Nobel prize<\/a> for the creation of this condensate.<\/p>\n<p>Cooling molecules to the ground state of a trap is much trickier than cooling atoms because they can contain thermal energy in so many internal degrees of freedom, and was only achieved by <a href=\"https:\/\/jila.colorado.edu\/yelabs\/people\/ye\">Jun Ye<\/a> of JILA in the US and colleagues recently.<sup>2<\/sup> In 2020, Ye\u2019s group applied an electric field to potassium\u2013rubidium molecules, which decay into diatomic potassium and rubidium molecules. The researchers showed that, at a specific field, the molecules were excited into states forbidden by quantum mechanics and could get close enough to react. This drastically slowed the decay rate. \u2018For our system, we typically think that, if the two molecules get very close together, there is close to a 100% chance that they will undergo a chemical reaction,\u2019 explains <a href=\"https:\/\/jila.colorado.edu\/yelabs\/people\/lab-members\">Kyle Matsuda<\/a>, Ye\u2019s PhD student and the 2020 paper\u2019s lead author.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Probability of a reaction occurring increases 100-fold and points to quantum control of chemistry. A new step towards quantum control of chemistry has been achieved by researchers in the US, who found that tuning the magnetic field applied to colliding ultracold molecules could alter the probability of them reacting or undergoing inelastic scattering a 100-fold.1 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}