Spinor condensates have proven to be a rich area for probing many-body phenomena richer than that of an ultracold gas consisting of atoms restricted to a single spin state. In the strongly correlated regime, the physics controlling the possible novel phases of the condensate remains largely unexplored, and few-body aspects can play a central role in the properties and dynamics of the system through manifestations of Efimov physics. The present study solves the three-body problem for bosonic spinors using the hyperspherical adiabatic representation and characterizes the multiple families of Efimov states in spinor systems as well as their signatures in the scattering observables relevant for spinor condensates. These solutions exhibit a rich array of possible phenomena originating in universal few-body physics, which can strongly affect the spin dynamics and three-body mean-field contributions for spinor condensates. The collisional aspects of atom-dimer spinor condensates are also analyzed, and effects are predicted that derive from Efimov physics.
Spinor condensates have proven to be a rich area for probing many-body phenomena richer than that of an ultracold gas consisting of atoms restricted to a single spin state. In the strongly correlated regime, the physics controlling the possible novel phases of the condensate remains largely unexplored, and few-body aspects can play a central role in the properties and dynamics of the system through manifestations of Efimov physics. The present study solves the three-body problem for bosonic spinors using the hyperspherical adiabatic representation and characterizes the multiple families of Efimov states in spinor systems as well as their signatures in the scattering observables relevant for spinor condensates. These solutions exhibit a rich array of possible phenomena originating in universal few-body physics, which can strongly affect the spin dynamics and three-body mean-field contributions for spinor condensates. The collisional aspects of atom-dimer spinor condensates are also analyzed, and effects are predicted that derive from Efimov physics.
Abstract Optical trapping techniques allow for the formation of bosonic condensates with internal degrees of freedom, so-called spinor condensates. Mean-field models of spinor condensates highlight the sensitivity of the quantum phases of the system to the relative strength of the two-body interaction in the different spin-channels. Such a description captures the regime where these interactions are weak. In the opposite and largely unexplored regime of strongly correlated spinor condensates, three-body interactions can play an important role through the Efimov effect, producing possible novel phases. Here, we study the three-body spinor problem using the hyperspherical adiabatic representation for spin-1, -2 and -3 condensates in the strongly-correlated regime. We characterize the Efimov physics for such systems and the relevant three-body mean-field parameters. We find that the Efimov effect can strongly affect the spin dynamics and three-body mean-field contributions to the possible quantum phases of the condensate through universal contributions to scattering observables.
Few-body systems with access to multiple internal levels exhibit richness beyond that typically found in their single-level counterparts. One example is that of Efimov states in strongly-correlated spinor three-body systems. In [V. E. Colussi, C. H. Greene, and J. P. D'Incao, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 045302 (2014)] this problem was analyzed for spinor condensates finding a complex level structure as in an early work [Bulgac and Efimov, Sov. J. Nucl. Phys. 22, 153 (1976)] in nuclear physics, and the impact of Efimov physics on the general form of the scattering observables was worked out. In this paper we discuss the appearance of novel families of Efimov states in the spinor three-body problem.
Few-body systems with access to multiple internal levels exhibit richness beyond that typically found in their single-level counterparts. One example is that of Efimov states in strongly-correlated spinor three-body systems. In [V. E. Colussi, C. H. Greene, and J. P. D’Incao, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 045302 (2014)] this problem was analyzed for spinor condensates finding a complex level structure as in an early work [Bulgac and Efimov, Sov. J. Nucl. Phys. 22, 153 (1976)] in nuclear physics, and the impact of Efimov physics on the general form of the scattering observables was worked out. In this paper we discuss the appearance of novel families of Efimov states in the spinor three-body problem.
Few-body effects play an important role for the understanding of ultracold quantum gases. We make use of an effective field theory approach to investigate various aspects of universal few-body physics close to a Feshbach resonance. That is the regime where the scattering length is large compared to all other length scales of the system and thus determines the observables. It is also the regime where the Efimov effect whose main characteristic is the occurrence of a sequence of three-body bound states becomes important. At unitarity, i.e., for diverging scattering length, the ratio of binding energies of neighboring states approaches a constant. The existence of those trimers can be captured by a single three-body parameter and influences observables such as recombination rates. Starting from adequate Lagrangians, we derive atom-dimer scattering amplitudes that contain all information of interest about the three-particle systems. With this method, we first investigate the scattering of atoms and dimers at finite temperature in the presence of the Efimov effect. We calculate the dimer relaxation rate and obtain good agreement with available experimental data. Furthermore, heteronuclear mixtures exhibiting large interspecies scattering length are studied in detail. If bosons are the majority species, the Efimov effect occurs in an S-wave channel and we are able to compute three-body recombination and dimer relaxation rates. The results are compared to the outcome of two existing experiments. For mainly fermionic systems, the Efimov effect is only present in an overall P-wave and three-body recombination at threshold vanishes. However, in mixtures of atoms and dimers, scattering cross sections and dimer relaxation show the typical Efimov behavior of log-periodicity. We also consider two-dimensional Bose gases, where the Efimov effect does not occur. For those systems, we derive an equation including the first non-universal corrections and deduce three-body observables such as binding energies and atom-dimer scattering parameters.
Abstract We provide a general discussion on the importance of three-body Efimov physics for strongly interacting ultracold quantum gases. Using the adiabatic hyperspherical representation, we discuss a universal classification of three-body systems in terms of the attractive or repulsive character of the effective interactions. The hyperspherical representation leads to a simple and conceptually clear picture for the bound and scattering properties of three-body systems with strong s -wave interactions. Using our universal classification scheme, we present a detailed discussion of all relevant ultracold three-body scattering processes using a pathway analysis that makes evident the importance of Efimov physics in determining the energy and scattering length dependence of such processes. This article provides a general overview of the current status of the field and a discussion of various issues relevant to the lifetime and stability of ultracold quantum gases along with universal properties of ultracold, resonantly interacting, few-body systems.
Three oriented bosonic dipoles are treated by using the hyperspherical adiabatic representation, providing numerical evidence that the Efimov effect persists near a two-dipole resonance and in a system where angular momentum is not conserved. Our results further show that the Efimov features in scattering observables become universal, with a known three-body parameter; i.e., the resonance energies depend only on the two-body physics, which also has implications for the universal spectrum of the four-dipole problem. Moreover, the Efimov states should be long-lived, which is favorable for their creation and manipulation in ultracold dipolar gases. Finally, deeply bound two-dipole states are shown to be relatively stable against collisions with a third dipole, owing to the emergence of a repulsive interaction originating in the angular momentum nonconservation for this system.