Long-lived fermionic Feshbach molecules with tunable $p$-wave interactions

Abstract

Ultracold fermionic Feshbach molecules are promising candidates for exploring quantum matter with strong $p$-wave interactions, however, their lifetimes were measured to be short. Here, we characterize the $p$-wave collisions of ultracold fermionic ${}^{23}{\mathrm{Na}}^{40}\mathrm{K}$ Feshbach molecules for different scattering lengths and temperatures. By increasing the binding energy of the molecules, the two-body loss coefficient reduces by three orders of magnitude leading to a second-long lifetime, 20 times longer than that of ground-state molecules. We exploit the scaling of elastic and inelastic collisions with the scattering length and temperature to identify a regime where the elastic collisions dominate over the inelastic ones allowing the molecular sample to thermalize. Our work provides a benchmark for four-body calculations of molecular collisions and is essential for producing a degenerate Fermi gas of Feshbach molecules.

References in corpus (11)

• Cold molecules: Progress in Quantum Engineering of Chemistry and Quantum Matter
• Ultracold Fermionic Feshbach Molecules of ${}^{23}$Na${}^{40}$K
• Observation of heteronuclear atomic Efimov resonances
• Evaporation of microwave-shielded polar molecules to quantum degeneracy
• Collisional stability of fermionic Feshbach molecules
• Inelastic collisions of ultra-cold heteronuclear molecules in an optical trap
• Transition from a polaronic condensate to a degenerate Fermi gas of heteronuclear molecules
• Feshbach Resonances in an Erbium-Dysprosium Dipolar Mixture
• Collisions between tunable halo dimers: exploring an elementary four-body process with identical bosons
• Collisional properties of weakly bound heteronuclear dimers
• Suppression of Unitary Three-body Loss in a Degenerate Bose-Fermi Mixture

Cited by in corpus (4)

• BCS-BCS crossover between atomic and molecular superfluids in a Bose-Fermi mixture
• Fate of thermalization of ultracold fermions with two-body dissipation
• Exact Thermodynamics For Weakly Interacting Normal-Phase Quantum Gases: Equations of State For All Partial Waves
• Single Particle Spectroscopies of $p$-wave and $d$-wave Interacting Bose Gases in Normal Phase