Towards sympathetic cooling of large molecules: cold collisions between benzene and rare gas atoms

This paper reports on calculations of collisional cross sections for the complexes X-C6H6 (X = He-3, He-4, Ne) at temperatures in the range 1 mu K-10 K and shows that relatively large cross sections in the 10(3)-10(5) angstrom(2) range are available for collisional cooling. Both elastic and inelastic processes are considered in this temperature range. The calculations suggest that sympathetically cooling benzene to microkelvin temperatures is feasible using these co-trapped rare gas atoms in an optical trap.