Three-body recombination in a three-state Fermi gas with widely tunable interactions

Abstract

We investigate the stability of a three spin state mixture of ultracold fermionic ${}^6$Li atoms over a range of magnetic fields encompassing three Feshbach resonances. For most field values, we attribute decay of the atomic population to three-body processes involving one atom from each spin state and find that the three-body loss coefficient varies by over four orders of magnitude. We observe high stability when at least two of the three scattering lengths are small, rapid loss near the Feshbach resonances, and two unexpected resonant loss features. At our highest fields, where all pairwise scattering lengths are approaching $a_t=-2140a_0$, we measure a three-body loss coefficient $L_3\simeq 5\times 10^{-22}{\mathrm{cm}}^6/\mathrm{s}$ and a trend toward lower decay rates for higher fields indicating that future studies of color superfluidity and trion formation in a SU(3) symmetric Fermi gas may be feasible.

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• Molecular Probe of Pairing in the BEC-BCS Crossover
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• BCS pairing in Fermi systems with several flavors
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Observation of an Efimov spectrum in an atomic system
• Observation of universality in ultracold 7Li three-body recombination
• Observation of heteronuclear atomic Efimov resonances
• Critical Temperature for $\alpha$-Particle Condensation within a Momentum Projected Mean Field Approach
• Confinement-induced Efimov resonances in Fermi-Fermi mixtures
• Three-body loss in lithium from functional renormalization
• Unified description of pairing, trionic and quarteting states for one-dimensional SU(4) attractive fermions
• Resonant Atom-Dimer Relaxation in Ultracold Atoms