Cold chemistry with electronically excited Ca+ Coulomb crystals

Rate constants for chemical reactions of laser-cooled Ca+ ions and neutral polar molecules (CH3F, CH2F2, or CH3Cl) have been measured at low collision energies (< E-coll >/k(B)=5-243 K). Low kinetic energy ensembles of Ca-40(+) ions are prepared through Doppler laser cooling to form Coulomb crystals in which the ions form a latticelike arrangement in the trapping potential. The trapped ions react with translationally cold beams of polar molecules produced by a quadrupole guide velocity selector or with room-temperature gas admitted into the vacuum chamber. Imaging of the Ca+ ion fluorescence allows the progress of the reaction to be monitored. Product ions are sympathetically cooled into the crystal structure and are unambiguously identified through resonance-excitation mass spectrometry using just two trapped ions. Variations of the laser-cooling parameters are shown to result in different steady-state populations of the electronic states of Ca-40(+) involved in the laser-cooling cycle, and these are modeled by solving the optical Bloch equations for the eight-level system. Systematic variation of the steady-state populations over a series of reaction experiments allows the extraction of bimolecular rate constants for reactions of the ground state (S-2(1/2)) and the combined excited states (D-2(3/2) and P-2(1/2)) of Ca-40(+). These results are analyzed in the context of capture theories and ab initio electronic structure calculations of the reaction profiles. In each case, suppression of the ground state rate constant is explained by the presence of a submerged or real barrier on the ground state potential surface. Rate constants for the excited states are generally found to be in line with capture theories. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3505142]