Universal van der Waals Physics for Three Ultracold Atoms

Abstract

Experimental studies with ultracold atoms have enabled major breakthroughs in understanding three-body physics, historically a fundamental yet challenging problem. This is because the interactions among ultracold atoms can be precisely varied using magnetically tunable scattering resonances known as Feshbach resonances. The collisions of ultracold atoms have been discovered to have many universal aspects near the unitarity limit. Away from this limit, many quantum states are expected to be active during a three-body collision, making the collisional observables practically unpredictable. Here we report a major development in predicting three-body ultracold scattering rates by properly building in the pairwise van der Waals interactions plus the multi-spin properties of a tunable Feshbach resonance state characterized by two known dimensionless two-body parameters. Numerical solution of the Schr{ö}dinger equation then predicts the three-atom collisional rates without adjustable fitting parameters needed to fit data. Our calculations show quantitative agreement in magnitude and feature position and shape across the full range of tuning of measured rate coefficients for three-body recombination and atom-dimer collisions involving ultracold Cs atoms.

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References in corpus (14)

• Three-boson problem near a narrow Feshbach resonance
• Observation of universality in ultracold 7Li three-body recombination
• Observation of an Efimov-like resonance in ultracold atom-dimer scattering
• Analytical solution of the bosonic three-body problem
• Feshbach resonances, weakly bound molecular states and coupled-channel potentials for cesium at high magnetic fields
• Universal three-body parameter in heteronuclear atomic systems
• Microscopic Origin and Universality Classes of the Efimov Three-Body Parameter
• Excited Thomas-Efimov levels in ultracold gases
• Efimov Physics and the Three-Body Parameter within a Two-Channel Framework
• Three-Body Recombination of Identical Bosons with a Large Positive Scattering Length at Nonzero Temperature
• A two-channel R-matrix analysis of magnetic field induced Feshbach resonances
• Resonant atom-dimer collisions in cesium: Testing universality at positive scattering lengths
• Crossover in the Efimov spectrum
• Finite Range Effects in Energies and Recombination Rates of Three Identical Bosons

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Heteronuclear Efimov scenario with positive intraspecies scattering length
• Calibration of Interaction Energy between Bose and Fermi Superfluids
• Universality of weakly bound dimers and Efimov trimers close to Li-Cs Feshbach resonances
• Universality in Efimov associated tetramers in 4He
• The three-body parameter for Efimov states in lithium-6
• The multichannel nature of three-body recombination for ultracold ${}^{39}$K
• Finite-temperature effects on a triatomic Efimov resonance in ultracold cesium
• Ultracold heteronuclear three-body systems: How diabaticity limits the universality of recombination into shallow dimers
• A multichannel hyperspherical model for Efimov physics with van der Waals interactions controlled by a Feshbach resonance
• Loosely Bound Few-Body States in a Spin-1 Gas with Near-Degenerate Continua
• Emergence of N-body tunable interactions in universal few-atom system
• Efimov energy level rebounding off the atom-dimer continuum