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arXiv:0810.3288 · Physical Review Letters

Three-Body Recombination in a Three-State Fermi Gas with Widely Tunable Interactions

J. H. Huckans, Jason Williams, E.L. Hazlett, R.W. Stites, Kenneth M. O’Hara

Published Apr 24, 2009• 291 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate the stability of a three spin state mixture of ultracold fermionic 6Li atoms over a range of magnetic fields encompassing three Feshbach resonances. For most field values, we attribute decay of the atomic population to three-body processes involving one atom from each spin state and find that the three-body loss coefficient varies by over 4 orders of magnitude. We observe high stability when at least two of the three scattering lengths are small, rapid loss near the Feshbach resonances, and two unexpected resonant loss features. At our highest fields, where all pairwise scattering lengths are approaching a_{t}=-2140a_{0}, we measure a three-body loss coefficient L_{3} approximately 5x10;{-22} cm;{6}/s and a trend toward lower decay rates for higher fields indicating that future studies of color superfluidity and trion formation in a SU(3) symmetric Fermi gas may be feasible.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.102.165302

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We investigate the stability of a three spin state mixture of ultracold fermionic 6Li atoms over a range of magnetic fields encompassing three Feshbach resonances. For most field values, we attribute decay of the atomic population to three-body processes involving one atom from each spin state and find that the three-body loss coefficient varies by over 4 orders of magnitude. We observe high stability when at least two of the three scattering lengths are small, rapid loss near the Feshbach resonances, and two unexpected resonant loss features. At our highest fields, where all pairwise scattering lengths are approaching a_{t}=-2140a_{0}, we measure a three-body loss coefficient L_{3} approximately 5x10;{-22} cm;{6}/s and a trend toward lower decay rates for higher fields indicating that future studies of color superfluidity and trion formation in a SU(3) symmetric Fermi gas may be feasible.
We report on the creation of a degenerate Fermi gas consisting of a balanced mixture of atoms in three different hyperfine states of 6Li. This new system consists of three distinguishable fermions with different and tunable interparticle scattering lengths a_{12}, a_{13}, and a_{23}. We are able to prepare samples containing 5x10;{4} atoms in each state at a temperature of about 215 nK, which corresponds to T/T_{F} approximately 0.37. We investigated the collisional stability of the gas for magnetic fields between 0 and 600 G and found a prominent loss feature at 130 G. From lifetime measurements, we determined three-body loss coefficients, which vary over nearly 3 orders of magnitude.
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This thesis reports on experimental studies of few-body physics in ultracold Fermi gases. The main part is devoted to the first realisation of an ultracold three-component Fermi gas in thermal equilibrium that consists of atoms in the three lowest spin states of 6Li. In first experiments the collisional stability of the gas was investigated in dependence of the interparticle interaction. The interaction strength was tuned by an external magnetic field employing Feshbach resonances in all three two-body scattering channels. At two magnetic field values a resonant enhancement of three-body loss was observed that can be explained by an Efimov-like trimer consisting of one atom in each of the three states which crosses the continuum twice in the studied magnetic field region. The behaviour of three-body loss rates could be understood by taking into account a variation of the lifetime of the trimer with the magnetic field. These experiments were performed with large ensembles of atoms. A finite deeply degenerate Fermi gas consisting of a controlled number of atoms may serve as a clean model for finite Fermi systems as for example atomic nuclei. An approach for the preparation of such a gas is discussed and first experimental steps are presented.
We report on the observation of magnetic Feshbach resonances in a Fermi-Fermi mixture of ultracold atoms with extreme mass imbalance and on their unique p-wave dominated three-body recombination processes.Our system consists of open-shell alkali-metal 6 Li and closed-shell 173 Yb atoms, both spin polarized and held at various temperatures between 1 and 20 μK.We confirm that Feshbach resonances in this system are solely the result of a weak separation-dependent hyperfine coupling between the electronic spin of 6 Li and the nuclear spin of 173 Yb.Our analysis also shows that three-body recombination rates are controlled by the identical fermion nature of the mixture, even in the presence of s-wave collisions between the two species and with recombination rate coefficients outside the Wigner threshold regime at our lowest temperature.Specifically, a comparison of experimental and theoretical line shapes of the recombination process indicates that the characteristic asymmetric line shape as a function of applied magnetic field and a maximum recombination rate coefficient that is independent of temperature can only be explained by triatomic collisions with nonzero, p-wave total orbital angular momentum.The resonances can be used to form ultracold doublet ground-state molecules and to simulate quantum superfluidity in mass-imbalanced mixtures.
We study three-body recombination of fully spin-polarized 6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li atoms that are interacting resonantly in relative ppp waves. Motivated by a recent experiment, we focus on negative scattering volumes where three atoms recombine into a deep dimer and another atom. We calculate the three-body recombination rate using a Faddeev equation derived from effective field theory. In particular, we study the magnetic field and temperature dependences of the loss rate and use the recombination data to determine the effective range of the ppp-wave atom-atom interaction. We also predict the existence of a shallow three-body resonance state that manifests itself as a prominent feature in the energy-dependent three-body recombination rate.