Cold collisions of highly rotationally excited CO2 with He: The prospects for cold chemistry with super-rotors

Building on recent advances in ultrafast lasers and methods to slow molecules, an experiment is proposed to produce translationally cold CO2 super-rotors (j∼200) by combining an optical centrifuge with helium-buffer-gas cooling. Quantum mechanical calculations of the complex scattering length for He-CO2 collisions demonstrate that the efficiency of rotational quenching decreases rapidly with increasing rotational excitation j in the ultracold …