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arXiv:1406.7313 · Physical Review Letters

Association of Atoms into Universal Dimers Using an Oscillating Magnetic Field

Christian B. Langmack, Dane Hudson Smith, Eric Braaten

Published Mar 11, 2015• 16 citations
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Abstract

In a system of ultracold atoms near a Feshbach resonance, pairs of atoms can be associated into universal dimers by an oscillating magnetic field with a frequency near that determined by the dimer binding energy. We present a simple expression for the transition rate that takes into account many-body effects through a transition matrix element of the contact. In a thermal gas, the width of the peak in the transition rate as a function of the frequency is determined by the temperature. In a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms, the width is determined by the inelastic scattering rates of a dimer with zero-energy atoms. Near an atom-dimer resonance, there is a dramatic increase in the width from inelastic atom-dimer scattering and from atom-atom-dimer recombination. The recombination contribution provides a signature for universal tetramers that are Efimov states consisting of two atoms and a dimer.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.114.103002

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In a system of ultracold atoms near a Feshbach resonance, pairs of atoms can be associated into universal dimers by an oscillating magnetic field with a frequency near that determined by the dimer binding energy. We present a simple expression for the transition rate that takes into account many-body effects through a transition matrix element of the contact. In a thermal gas, the width of the peak in the transition rate as a function of the frequency is determined by the temperature. In a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms, the width is determined by the inelastic scattering rates of a dimer with zero-energy atoms. Near an atom-dimer resonance, there is a dramatic increase in the width from inelastic atom-dimer scattering and from atom-atom-dimer recombination. The recombination contribution provides a signature for universal tetramers that are Efimov states consisting of two atoms and a dimer.
In a gas of ultracold atoms whose scattering length is controlled by a magnetic Feshbach resonance, atoms can be associated into universal dimers by an oscillating longitudinal magnetic field. In addition to the harmonic resonance with frequency near that determined by the dimer binding energy, there is a subharmonic resonance with half that frequency. If the thermal gas contains dimers, they can be dissociated into unbound atoms by the oscillating magnetic field. We show that the transition rates for association and dissociation can be calculated by treating the oscillating magnetic field as a sinusoidal time-dependent perturbation proportional to the contact operator. Many-body effects are taken into account through transition matrix elements of the contact operator. We calculate both the harmonic and subharmonic transition rates analytically for association in a thermal gas of atoms and for dissociation in a thermal gas of dimers.
The pairwise interactions of ultracold atoms can be resonantly enhanced by tuning the scattering length to infinity using a Feshbach resonance.In a gas of ultracold atoms whose scattering length is controlled by a magnetic Feshbach resonance, the atoms can be associated into universal dimers and the dimers can be dissociated into unbound atoms by using an oscillating longitudinal magnetic field with frequency near the binding energy of a dimer.If the gas of ultracold atoms are fermions, the oscillating magnetic field with frequency near the pairing gap can dissociate Cooper pairs into pairs of unbound atoms.In this thesis, we show that the transition rates for association and dissociation can be calculated by treating the oscillating magnetic field as a sinusoidal time-dependent perturbation proportional to the contact operator.We calculate both the harmonic and subharmonic transition rates analytically for association in a thermal gas of atoms and for dissociation in a thermal gas of dimers.We also calculate the harmonic transition rate analytically for the dissociation of Cooper pairs into pairs of unbound atoms in the BCS limit.Our results for the dissociation rate of Cooper pairs can be used to make a direct measurement of the pairing gap for fermionic atoms.
Atom loss resonances in ultracold trapped atoms have been observed at scattering lengths near atom-dimer resonances, at which Efimov trimers cross the atom-dimer threshold, and near two-dimer resonances, at which universal tetramers cross the dimer-dimer threshold. We propose a new mechanism for these loss resonances in a Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms. As the scattering length is ramped to the large final value at which the atom loss rate is measured, the time-dependent scattering length generates a small condensate of shallow dimers coherently from the atom condensate. The coexisting atom and dimer condensates can be described by a low-energy effective field theory with universal coefficients that are determined by matching exact results from few-body physics. The classical field equations for the atom and dimer condensates predict narrow enhancements in the atom loss rate near atom-dimer resonances and near two-dimer resonances due to inelastic dimer collisions.
Three-body systems with large scattering length display universal phenomena associated with a discrete scaling symmetry. These phenomena include resonant enhancement of three-body loss rates when an Efimov three-body resonance is at the scattering threshold. In particular, there can be resonant peaks in the atom-dimer relaxation rate for large positive scattering length. We improve upon earlier studies and calculate the atom-dimer relaxation rate as a function of temperature using a Bose-Einstein distribution for the thermal average. As input, we use calculations of the atom-dimer scattering phase shifts from effective field theory.
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.
We derive a universal formula for the rate constant $\ensuremath{\beta}$ for relaxation of a shallow dimer into deeply-bound diatomic molecules in the case of atoms with a large scattering length aaa. We show that $\ensuremath{\beta}$ is determined by aaa and by 2 three-body parameters that also determine the binding energies and widths of Efimov states. The rate constant $\ensuremath{\beta}$ scales like $\ensuremath{\hbar}a∕m$ near the resonance, but the coefficient is a periodic function of ln(a)\mathrm{ln}(a)ln(a) that may have resonant enhancement at values of aaa that differ by multiples of 22.7.