Strong spin-exchange recombination of three weakly interacting ${}^7$Li atoms

Abstract

We reveal a significant spin-exchange pathway in the three-body recombination process for ultracold lithium-7 atoms near a zero-crossing of the two-body scattering length. This newly discovered recombination pathway involves the exchange of spin between all three atoms, which is not included in many theoretical approaches with restricted spin structure. Taking it into account, our calculation is in excellent agreement with experimental observations. To contrast our findings, we predict the recombination rate around a different zero-crossing without strong spin-exchange effects to be two orders of magnitude smaller, which gives a clear advantage to future many-body experiments in this regime. This work opens new avenues to study elementary reaction processes governed by the spin degree of freedom in ultracold gases.

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Reshaped Three-Body Interactions and the Observation of an Efimov State in the Continuum
• Emergent inflation of the Efimov spectrum under three-body spin-exchange interactions
• Efimovian three-body potential from broad to narrow Feshbach resonances
• Energy-scaling of the product state distribution for three-body recombination of ultracold atoms
• Efimov resonance position near a narrow Feshbach resonance in ${}^6$Li-${}^{133}$Cs mixture
• Spin hierarchy in van der Waals molecule formation via ultracold three-body recombination
• Loosely Bound Few-Body States in a Spin-1 Gas with Near-Degenerate Continua
• Spin structure of diatomic van der Waals molecules of alkali atoms
• Accurate simulation of Efimov physics in ultracold atomic gases with realistic three-body multichannel interactions