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.

11 pages, 5 figures

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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