Three-Body Recombination of Ultracold Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecules

Abstract

A combined experimental and theoretical study is carried out on the three-body recombination process in a gas of microwave-shielded polar molecules. For ground-state polar molecules dressed with a strong microwave field, field-linked bound states can appear in the intermolecular potential. We model three-body recombination into such bound states using classical trajectory calculations. Our results show that recombination can explain the enhanced loss rates observed at small microwave detunings in trapped samples of bosonic NaCs [Bigagli, $\text{et al.}$, Nat. Phys. $\text{19}$ 1579-1584 (2023)]. Specifically, our calculations reproduce the experimentally measured three-body loss rates across a wide range of microwave Rabi couplings, detunings, and temperatures. This work suggests that for bosonic shielded molecular systems in which the two-body loss is sufficiently suppressed and a field-linked bound state is present, the dominant loss process will be three-body recombination.

arXiv comment11 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (35)

• Feshbach Resonances in Ultracold Gases
• Evidence for Efimov quantum states in an ultracold gas of cesium atoms
• Quantum-State Controlled Chemical Reactions of Ultracold KRb Molecules
• Three-body recombination of ultra-cold atoms to a weakly bound $s$ level
• Three-body recombination at large scattering lengths in an ultracold atomic gas
• Universal few-body physics and cluster formation
• Stable Topological Superfluid Phase of Ultracold Polar Fermionic Molecules
• Evaporation of microwave-shielded polar molecules to quantum degeneracy
• Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Dipolar Molecules
• Microwave shielding of ultracold polar molecules
• Resonant collisional shielding of reactive molecules using electric fields
• Repulsive shield between polar molecules
• Linking Ultracold Polar Molecules
• Controlling the scattering length of ultracold dipolar molecules
• Quasi-Universal Dipolar Scattering in Cold and Ultracold Gases
• Energy scaling of cold atom-atom-ion three-body recombination
• Collisionally Stable Gas of Bosonic Dipolar Ground State Molecules
• Ultracold Gas of Dipolar NaCs Ground State Molecules
• Ultracold Sticky Collisions: Theoretical and Experimental Status
• Comparison of classical and quantal calculations of helium three-body recombination
• Microwave shielding of bosonic NaRb molecules
• Field-linked resonances of polar molecules
• Tuning ultracold collisions of excited rotational dipolar molecules
• Blue-Detuned Magneto-Optical Trap of Molecules
• The Efimov effect for three interacting bosonic dipoles
• Optimizing the efficiency of evaporative cooling in optical dipole traps
• Tomography of Feshbach Resonance States
• Ultracold field-linked tetratomic molecules
• Quantum state resolved molecular dipolar collisions over four decades of energy
• Three-body recombination in physical chemistry
• Three body recombination of ultracold dipoles to weakly bound dimers
• High density loading and collisional loss of laser cooled molecules in an optical trap
• Controlling collisional loss and scattering lengths of ultracold dipolar molecules with static electric fields
• Efficient Pathway to NaCs Ground State Molecules
• Dressed-State Spectroscopy and Magic Trapping of Microwave-Shielded NaCs Molecules

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Double Microwave Shielding
• Effective potential and scattering length of shielding polar molecules
• First-order phase transition in atom-molecule quantum degenerate mixtures with coherent three-body recombination
• Efimov Effect in Ultracold Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecules
• Strongly dipolar molecular Bose-Einstein condensates: From few- to many-body physics
• Dynamical signatures of superfluidity and shear rigidity in different phases of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate