English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

Observation of the Efimov state of the helium trimer

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons22079

Schöllkopf,  Wieland
Molecular Physics, Fritz Haber Institute, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

1512.02036.pdf
(Preprint), 2MB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Kunitski, M., Zeller, S., Voigtsberger, J., Kalinin, A., Schmidt, L. P. H., Schöffler, M., et al. (2015). Observation of the Efimov state of the helium trimer. Science, 348(6234), 551-555. doi:10.1126/science.aaa5601.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0026-AC44-1
Abstract
Quantum theory dictates that upon weakening the two-body interaction in a three-body system, an infinite number of three-body bound states of a huge spatial extent emerge just before these three-body states become unbound. Three helium (He) atoms have been predicted to form a molecular system that manifests this peculiarity under natural conditions without artificial tuning of the attraction between particles by an external field. Here we report experimental observation of this long-predicted but experimentally elusive Efimov state of 4He3 by means of Coulomb explosion imaging. We show spatial images of an Efimov state, confirming the predicted size and a typical structure where two atoms are close to each other while the third is far away.