Influence of a tight isotropic harmonic trap on photoassociation in ultracold homonuclear alkali gases

Abstract

The influence of a tight isotropic harmonic trap on photoassociation of two ultracold alkali atoms forming a homonuclear diatomic is investigated using realistic atomic interaction potentials. Confinement of the initial atom pair due to the trap leads to a uniform strong enhancement of the photoassociation rate to most, but also to a strongly suppressed rate for some final states. Thus tighter traps do not necessarily enhance the photoassociation rate. A further massive enhancement of the rate is found for strong interatomic interaction potentials. The details of this interaction play a minor role, except for large repulsive interactions for which a sharp window occurs in the photoassociation spectrum as is known from the trap-free case. A comparison with simplified models describing the atomic interaction like the pseudopotential approximation shows that they often provide reasonable estimates for the trap-induced enhancement of the photoassociation rate even if the predicted rates can be completely erroneous.

arXiv comment19 pages, 17 figures

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Feshbach resonances in an ultracold ${}^7$Li and ${}^{87}$Rb mixture
• Exact theoretical description of two ultracold atoms in a single site of a 3D optical lattice using realistic interatomic interaction potentials
• Theory of inelastic confinement-induced resonances due to the coupling of center-of-mass and relative motion
• Theoretical description of two ultracold atoms in finite 3D optical lattices using realistic interatomic interaction potentials
• Laser control of ultracold molecule formation: The case of RbSr
• Two-channel model of photoassociation in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance
• Mimicking multi-channel scattering with single-channel approaches
• Non-perturbative theoretical description of two atoms in an optical lattice with time-dependent perturbations
• Confinement-Induced Resonances in Spherical Shell Traps