Resonant Manipulation of d-wave Interaction of Cold Atoms with Two Lasers and a Magnetic Field

Abstract

We present a theory for manipulation of d-wave interaction of cold atoms with two lasers strongly driving two photoassociative transitions. The theory predicts the occurrence of a coherence between two excited ro-vibrational bound states due to the photoassociative dipole-couplings of ground-state d-wave scattering state to the bound states. We show that this excited-state coherence significantly influences atom-atom interaction. In particular, this leads to the enhancement of d-wave elastic scattering and to the suppression of inelastic scattering. In the presence of an s-wave magnetic Feshbach resonance, the two lasers can couple the s-wave resonance with the d-wave scattering state leading to the further enhancement in d-wave scattering at relatively low energy. Our numerical calculations based on realistic parameters show that d-wave manipulation would be most effective in case of atoms having excited diatomic states with narrow natural linewidth. We estimate that at 100 $\mu$K the inelastic scattering rate in Yb can be reduced to 20 s${}^{-1}$ while the elastic scattering rate can be two orders of magnitude larger.

10 pages 3 figures. Numerical illustration with Yb atoms is new in version 3. This version 3 is the one which is published in Phys. Rev. A

References in corpus (8)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Theory of ultracold Fermi gases
• Vortices and Superfluidity in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Molecules
• Collective excitations of a degenerate gas at the BEC-BCS crossover
• Photoassociation of a Bose-Einstein Condensate near a Feshbach Resonance
• Confinement-induced p-wave resonances from s-wave interactions
• A Feshbach resonance in d-wave collisions

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Optical Feshbach resonances through a molecular dark state: Efficient manipulation of $p$-wave resonances in fermionic ${}^{171}$Yb atoms
• Electric field induced saturation effects in photoassociation of a pair of heteronuclear atoms