We experimentally investigate the unitarity-limited behavior of the three-body loss near a
p-wave Feshbach resonance in a single-component Fermi gas of
6Li atoms. At the unitarity limit, the three-body loss coefficient
L3 exhibits universality in the sense that it is independent of the interaction strength and follows the predicted temperature scaling law of ${L}_{3}\ensuremath{\propto}{T}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$. When decreasing the interaction strength from the unitarity regime, the three-body loss coefficient as a function of the interaction strength and temperature can be described by the theory based on the association of an excited resonant quasibound state and its relaxation into a deep stable dimer by collision with a third atom in the framework of the standard Breit-Wigner theoretical approach. The results reported here are important to understand the properties of a resonant
p-wave Fermi gas in the prospect of quantum few- and many-body physics.
We study collisional loss of a quasi-one-dimensional spin-polarized Fermi gas near a p-wave Feshbach resonance in ultracold ^{6}Li atoms. We measure the location of the p-wave resonance in quasi-1D and observe a confinement-induced shift and broadening. We find that the three-body loss coefficient L_{3} as a function of the quasi-1D confinement has little dependence on confinement strength. We also analyze the atom loss with a two-step cascade three-body loss model in which weakly bound dimers are formed prior to their loss arising from atom-dimer collisions. Our data are consistent with this model. We also find a possible suppression in the rate of dimer relaxation with strong quasi-1D confinement. We discuss the implications of these measurements for observing p-wave pairing in quasi-1D.
We study three-body recombination of fully spin-polarized
6Li atoms that are interacting resonantly in relative
p 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
p-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.
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 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 analyze the collision of three identical spin-polarized fermions at zero collision energy, assuming arbitrary finite-range potentials, and define the corresponding three-body scattering hypervolume
DF. The scattering hypervolume
D was first defined for identical bosons in 2008. It is the three-body analog of the two-body scattering length. We solve the three-body Schr\"odinger equation asymptotically when the three fermions are far apart or one pair and the third fermion are far apart, deriving two asymptotic expansions of the wave function. Unlike the case of bosons for which
D has the dimension of length to the fourth power, here the
DF we define has the dimension of length to the eighth power. We then analyze the interaction energy of three such fermions with momenta $\ensuremath{\hbar}{\mathbf{k}}_{1}$, $\ensuremath{\hbar}{\mathbf{k}}_{2}$, and $\ensuremath{\hbar}{\mathbf{k}}_{3}$ in a large periodic cubic box. The energy shift due to
DF is proportional to ${D}_{F}/{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}}^{2}$, where $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}$ is the volume of the box. We also calculate the shifts of energy and pressure of spin-polarized Fermi gases due to a nonzero
DF and the three-body recombination rate of spin-polarized ultracold atomic Fermi gases at finite temperatures.