The three-body recombination of a condensed Bose gas near a Feshbach resonance

Abstract

In this paper, we study the three-body recombination rate of a homogeneous dilute Bose gas with a Feshbach resonance at zero temperature. The ground state and excitations of this system are obtained. The three-body recombination in the ground state is due to the break-up of an atom pair in the quantum depletion and the formation of a molecule by an atom from the broken pair and an atom from the condensate. The rate of this process is in good agreement with the experiment on ${}^{23}$Na in a wide range of magnetic fields.

10 pages, 2 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. A