G. Quéméner,Laboratoire Aimé Cotton, CNRS, Bât. 505, Université Paris-Sud 11, 91405 Orsay (France)

J. L. Bohn, JILA, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0440 (USA)

Recently, evaporative cooling of OH radicals has been achieved in a magnetic trap [1]. To understand the dynamics of the gas of molecules inside the trap as it cools down, and/or to understand the loss of molecules when an additional external electric field is turned on, we take on the full problem of collisions of OH molecules, which have both electric and magnetic dipoles, in the presence of arbitrary superimposed magnetic and electric fields. We show the effect of such collisions in a magnetic quadrupole trap, for different applied electric fields and collision energies. We focus here on inelastic loss collisions.

[1] Benjamin K. Stuhl, Matthew T. Hummon, Mark Yeo, Goulven Quéméner, John L. Bohn, Jun Ye, Nature 492, 396 (2012).