Paper detail

Libration of strongly-oriented polar molecules inside a superfluid

We study a polar molecule immersed into a superfluid environment, such as a helium nanodroplet or a Bose-Einstein condensate, in the presence of an intense electrostatic field. We show that coupling of the molecular pendular motion, induced by the field, to the fluctuating bath leads to formation of pendulons -- spherical harmonic librators dressed by a field of many-particle excitations. We study the behavior of the pendulon in a broad range of molecule-bath and molecule-field interaction strengths, and reveal that its spectrum features series of instabilities which are absent in the field-free case of the angulon quasiparticle. Furthermore, we show that an external field allows to finetune the positions of these instabilities in the molecular rotational spectrum. This opens the door to detailed experimental studies of redistribution of orbital angular momentum in many-particle systems.