Rotation of cold molecular ions inside a Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We use recently developed angulon theory [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 203001 (2015)] to study the rotational spectrum of a cyanide molecular anion immersed into Bose-Einstein condensates of rubidium and strontium. Based on $\textit {ab initio}$ potential energy surfaces, we provide a detailed study of the rotational Lamb shift and many-body-induced fine structure which arise due to dressing of molecular rotation by a field of phonon excitations. We demonstrate that the magnitude of these effects is large enough in order to be observed in modern experiments on cold molecular ions. Furthermore, we introduce a novel method to construct pseudopotentials starting from the $\textit {ab initio}$ potential energy surfaces, which provides a means to obtain effective coupling constants for low-energy polaron models.