Non-Additivity of Microwave-Shielded Interactions between Dipolar Molecules
Abstract
Theoretical models of the effective interactions between microwave-shielded polar molecules typically rely on the assumption of pairwise additivity. In this work, we test the validity of this pairwise approximation by evaluating the exact many-body potential energy for configurations of three and four molecules. We demonstrate that this approximation fails for molecule configurations in the plane of the circularly polarized microwave field. In these planar geometries, many-body effects significantly increase the depth of the attractive potential well and shift the position of the repulsive barrier. Although out-of-plane interactions in three-dimensional arrangements weaken this non-additivity, the effective interactions between microwave-shielded dipoles are not a simple sum of pair interactions. In particular, their attractive well, crucial for self-bound clusters, can only be described by the full many-body potential energy.
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BibTeX
@misc{prieschl2026nonadditivity,
title = {{Non-Additivity of Microwave-Shielded Interactions between Dipolar Molecules}},
author = {Fabian Prieschl and Andreas Schindewolf and Robert E. Zillich},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.01940},
eprint = {2609.01940},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01940},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Non-Additivity of Microwave-Shielded Interactions between Dipolar Molecules
AU - Fabian Prieschl
AU - Andreas Schindewolf
AU - Robert E. Zillich
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.01940
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01940
AB - Theoretical models of the effective interactions between microwave-shielded polar molecules typically rely on the assumption of pairwise additivity. In this work, we test the validity of this pairwise approximation by evaluating the exact many-body potential energy for configurations of three and four molecules. We demonstrate that this approximation fails for molecule configurations in the plane of the circularly polarized microwave field. In these planar geometries, many-body effects significantly increase the depth of the attractive potential well and shift the position of the repulsive barrier. Although out-of-plane interactions in three-dimensional arrangements weaken this non-additivity, the effective interactions between microwave-shielded dipoles are not a simple sum of pair interactions. In particular, their attractive well, crucial for self-bound clusters, can only be described by the full many-body potential energy.
ER -