A simple model to describe electric field shielding of two-body ultracold molecular collisions

Recent experiments have shown that ultracold dipolar molecules, whether they are reactive or not, are prone to two-body molecular losses. This is a main drawback to create long-lived quantum degenerate gases. To overcome this, one can shield the molecules against collisions for which many set-ups have been proposed.

We focus here on a static electric field shielding which was proposed some years ago [1, 2, 3] and has been recently observed in confined [4] and non-confined geometries [5], leading to efficient evaporative cooling. We propose a theoretical model that can describe the main physical property of the shielding mechanism and semi-quantitatively approximate the electric field dependence of the rate coefficients around the shielding region, with no computational effort. The formalism can also illustrate the angular dependence of the shield at the microscopic level.

[1] Avdeenkov et al., Phys. Rev. A 73, 022707 (2006)

[2] Wang et al., New J. Phys. 17, 035015 (2015)

[3] Gonzalez-Martinez et al., Phys. Rev. A 96, 032718 (2017)

[4] Matsuda et al., Science 370, 1324 (2020)

[5] Li et al., submitted