Creation and observation of a ghost trilobite chemical bond

Abstract

The "trilobite" type of molecule, predicted in 2000 and observed experimentally in 2015, arises when a Rydberg electron exerts a weak attractive force on a neutral ground state atom. Such molecules have bond lengths exceeding 100 nm. The ultra-long-range chemical bond between the two atoms is a nonperturbative linear combination of the many degenerate electronic states associated with high principal quantum numbers, and the resulting electron probability distribution closely resembles a fossil trilobite from antiquity. We show how to coherently engineer this same long-range orbital through a sequence of electric and magnetic field pulses even when the ground state atom is not present, and propose several methods to observe the resulting orbital. The existence of such a ghost chemical bond in which an electron reaches out from one atom to a nonexistent second atom is a consequence of the high level degeneracy.