Prospects for ultracold polar and magnetic chromium-closed-shell-atom molecules

The properties of the electronic ground state of the polar and paramagnetic chromium-closed-shell-atom molecules have been investigated. State-of-the-art ab initio techniques have been applied to compute the potential energy curves for the chromium-alkaline-earth-metal-atom, CrX (X = Be, Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba), and chromium-ytterbium, CrYb, molecules in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for the high-spin X-7 Sigma(+) electronic ground state. The spin restricted open-shell coupled cluster method restricted to single, double, and noniterative triple excitations, RCCSD(T), was employed and the scalar relativistic effects within the Douglas-Kroll-Hess Hamiltonian or energy-consistent pseudopotentials were included. The permanent electric dipole moments and static electric dipole polarizabilities were computed. The leading long-range coefficients describing the dispersion interaction between the atoms at large interatomic distances C-6 are also reported. The molecules under investigation are examples of species possessing both large magnetic and electric dipole moments making them potentially interesting candidates for ultracold many-body physics studies.