Ground state potentials of the NaK molecule

Abstract

We present a simultaneous analysis of the X¹ Σ ⁺ and the a³ Σ ⁺ electronic ground states of the NaK molecule. Excitation of the [B ¹ Π, c³ Σ ⁺]-system made it possible to record fluorescence to rovibrational levels of both ground states simultaneously with a Fourier-transform spectrometer. For the first time high lying levels in the triplet state with v = 17 and v = 18 were seen, the highest possible v = 19 for ²³Na-³⁹K was not observed. The joint evaluation of the retrieved data leads to accurate potential energy curves, that describe the experimental data within their experimental uncertainty of 0.005 cm⁻¹. Cold collision properties like scattering length and Feshbach resonance positions are calculated with these potentials and compared to other predictions.