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arXiv:1109.2496 · Physical Review A

Numerical study of three-body recombination for systems with many bound states

Jia Wang, José Paulo D'Incao, Chris H. Greene

Published Nov 23, 2011• 60 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Three-body recombination processes are treated numerically for a system of three identical bosons. The two-body model potentials utilized support many bound states, a major leap in complexity that produces an intricate structure of sharp nonadiabatic avoided crossings in the three-body hyperradial adiabatic potentials at short distances. This model thus displays the usual difficulties of more realistic systems. To overcome the numerical challenges associated with sharp avoided crossings, the slow variable discretization approach is adopted in the region of small hyperradii. At larger hyperradii, where the adiabatic potentials and couplings are smooth, the traditional adiabatic method suffices. Despite the high degree of complexity, recombination into deeply bound states behaves regularly due to the dominance of one decay pathway, resulting from the strong coupling between different recombination channels. Moreover, the usual Wigner threshold law must be modified for excited incident recombination channels.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.052721

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Three-body recombination processes are treated numerically for a system of three identical bosons. The two-body model potentials utilized support many bound states, a major leap in complexity that produces an intricate structure of sharp nonadiabatic avoided crossings in the three-body hyperradial adiabatic potentials at short distances. This model thus displays the usual difficulties of more realistic systems. To overcome the numerical challenges associated with sharp avoided crossings, the slow variable discretization approach is adopted in the region of small hyperradii. At larger hyperradii, where the adiabatic potentials and couplings are smooth, the traditional adiabatic method suffices. Despite the high degree of complexity, recombination into deeply bound states behaves regularly due to the dominance of one decay pathway, resulting from the strong coupling between different recombination channels. Moreover, the usual Wigner threshold law must be modified for excited incident recombination channels.
We study three-body recombination in two dimensions for systems interacting via short-range two-body interactions in the regime of large scattering lengths. Using the adiabatic hyperspherical representation, we derive semianalytical formulas for three-body recombination in both weakly and deeply bound diatom states. Our results demonstrate the importance of long-range corrections to the three-body potentials by showing how they alter the low-energy and scattering-length dependence of the recombination rate for both bosonic and fermionic systems, which exhibit suppressed recombination if compared to the three-dimensional case. We verify these results through numerical calculations of recombination for systems with finite-range interactions and supporting a few two-body bound states. We also study finite-range effects for the energies of the universal three-identical-bosons states and find a slow approach to universal predictions as a function of the scattering length.
This work treats resonant collisions between five identical ultracold bosons in the framework of the adiabatic hyperspherical representation. The five-body recombination rate coefficient is quantified using a semiclassical description in conjunction with an analysis of the lowest five-body hyperspherical adiabatic potential curves in a scattering length regime with no universal weakly bound tetramers, trimers, or dimers. A comparison is made between these results and the only existing experimental measurement of five-body loss in an ultracold gas of bosonic cesium atoms and with the lone theoretical estimation of the loss rate. The recombination rate for the process B + B + B + B + B → B 4 + B is also computed in a different regime of scattering lengths where there is one universal bound tetramer by implementing a few-channel quantum scattering calculation based on five-body hyperspherical potential curves and nonadiabatic couplings. Our calculations predict regions where five-body recombination can cause decay of the atom cloud in an ultracold gas that is even faster than 3-body and 4-body recombination, which can ideally be tested by using the current generation of box traps having nearly uniform density.
Hyperspherical coordinates provide a systematic way of describing three-body systems. Solving three-body Schrödinger equations in an adiabatic hyperspherical representation is the focus of this thesis. An essentially exact solution can be found numerically by including nonadiabatic couplings using either a slow variable discretization or a traditional adiabatic method. Two different types of three-body systems are investigated: (1) rovibrational states of the triatomic hydrogen ion H+3 and (2) ultracold collisions of three identical bosons.
We study three-body recombination in the helium-helium-silver system at cold collision energies. The three-body Schr\"odinger equation is solved combining the slow variable discretization and adiabatic approaches with the RRR-matrix propagation method, in order to calculate the product-state-selective total and partial recombination rates in the 4He+4He+^{4}\mathrm{He}+^{4}\mathrm{He} +4He+4He+ Ag system. Recombination at collision energies less than 10 mK is found to take place dominantly to the product molecule 4HeAg^{4}\mathrm{He}\mathrm{Ag}4HeAg in its least bound state, while the three atoms recombine mainly to the 4He2^{4}\mathrm{He}_{2}4He2​ molecule in its ground state at higher collision energies.
We study the three-body problem in one dimension for both zero- and finite-range interactions using the adiabatic hyperspherical approach. Particular emphasis is placed on the threshold laws for recombination, which are derived for all combinations of the parity and exchange symmetries. For bosons, we provide a numerical demonstration of several universal features that appear in the three-body system, and discuss how certain universal features in three dimensions are different in one dimension. We show that the probability for inelastic processes vanishes as the range of the pairwise interaction is taken to zero and demonstrate numerically that the recombination threshold law manifests itself for large scattering length.
We are developing theoretical and computational methods to study two related three-body processes in ultracold quantum gases: three-body resonances and three-body recombination. Three-body recombination causes the ultracold gas to heat up and atoms to leave the trap where they are confined. Therefore, it is an undesirable effect in the process of forming ultracold quantum gases. Metastable three-body states (resonances) are formed in the ultracold gas. When decaying they also give additional kinetic energy to the gas, that leads to the heating too. In addition, a reliable method to obtain three-body resonances would be useful in a number of problems in other fields of physics, for example, in models of metastable nuclei or to study dissociative recombination of H3 +. Our project consists of employing computer modeling to develop a method to obtain three-body resonances. The method uses a novel two-step diagonalization approach to solve the three-body Schrödinger equation. The approach employs the SVD method of Tolstikhin et al. coupled with a complex absorbing potential. We tested this method on a model system of three identical bosons with nucleon mass and compared it to the results of a previous study. This model can be employed to understand the 3He nucleus . We found one three-body bound state and four resonances. We are also studying Efimov resonances using a 4He-based model. In a system of identical spinless bosons, Efimov states are a series of loosely bound three-body states which begin to appear as the energy of the two-body bound state approaches zero . Although they were predicted 35 years ago, recent evidence of Efimov states found by Kraemer et al. in a gas of ultracold Cs atoms has sparked great interest by theorists and experimentalists. Efimov resonances are a kind of pre-dissociated Efimov trimer. To search for Efimov resonances we tune the diatom interaction potential, V(r): V(r) → λV(r) as Esry et al. did . We calculated the first two values of λ for which there is a "condensation" (infinite number) of Efimov states. They are λEfimov1 = 0.9765 and λEfimov2 = 6.834. We performed calculations for λ = 2.4, but found no evidence of Efimov resonances. For future work we plan to work with λ ≈ 4 and λ ≈ λEfimov2 where we might see d-wave and higher l-wave Efimov resonances. There is also a many-body project that forms part of this thesis and consists of a direct diagonalization of the Bogolyubov Hamiltonian, which describes elementary excitations of a gas of bosons interacting through a pairwise interaction. We would like to reproduce the corresponding energy spectrum. So far we have performed several convergence tests, but have not observed the desired energy spectrum. We show preliminary results.