Reaction between ultracold molecules reveals limits of quantum statistics
Real-world molecules don’t always follow the quantum-statistical model
Researchers in the US and China have unveiled results in ultracold potassium rubidium dimers, showing for the first time how quantum effects cause deviations from the quantum-statistical model, one of the canonical theories of physical chemistry.
Chemical reactions are fundamentally highly complex quantum transformations of one set of electronic orbitals into another, but the equations required to model reactions on this basis are usually beyond what we can solve. Chemists therefore rely on multiple approximations to determine the path of a reaction.