Charge Exchange Reaction between CaH⁺ and ³⁹K in an Ion-Atom Hybrid Trap

The development of hybrid ion-atom traps has led to significant progress in studying ion-neutral chemistry at ultracold temperatures. These studies have been largely limited to interactions between atomic ions and neutral atoms and there have been very few molecular ion-neutral atom systems investigated in the cold regime. In this talk, we add to that rare list by presenting our work on observing charge exchange reactions between calcium mono-hydride molecular ions (CaH⁺) and neutral potassium atoms (³⁹K). We do this in our hybrid ion-atom trap which is integrated with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOF-MS) [1]. We trap ⁴⁰Ca⁺ and CaH⁺ ions in a linear Paul trap and Doppler cool the Ca⁺ ions- this sympathetically cools the translational motion of CaH⁺ ions. Our atom trap is a magneto-optical trap (3D MOT) for trapping ³⁹K atoms. We have the ability to move the atoms trap center with respect to the ion trap- allowing us to conduct precise interaction studies between our ions and neutral ³⁹K atoms [2].



References:

[1] S. Jyothi, et al., Rev. Sci. Instum. 90, 103201 (2019)

[2] H. Li, et al., Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 22, 10870 (2020)