Efimov effect and three-body decay

Vidya Sagar Bhasin, I. Mazumdar

Brett D. Esry, José Paulo D'Incao

J. P. D’Incao, J. Wang, Brett D. Esry +1 more

Lihong Zhou, Xiaoling Cui

Two-body dissipation usually gives rise to a complex interaction. Here we study the effect of two-body dissipation on few-body physics, including the fundamental two-body effective scattering and the three-body Efimov physics. By employing a two-channel model that incorporates the decay of closed-channel molecules (generating the two-body dissipation), we explicitly relate the real and imaginary part of the inverse scattering length (${a}_{s}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$) to closed-channel detuning and decay rate. In particular, we show that the imaginary part of ${a}_{s}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ is given by the product of the molecule decay rate and the effective range. Such complex scattering length is found to generate an additional imaginary Coulomb potential when three atoms come close to each other, thereby suppressing the formation of trimer bound states and modifying the conventional discrete scaling in Efimov physics.

José Paulo D'Incao, Jia Wang, V. E. Colussi

We study the impact of three-body physics in quenched unitary Bose gases, focusing on the role of the Efimov effect. Using a local density model, we solve the three-body problem and determine three-body decay rates at unitarity, finding density-dependent, log-periodic Efimov oscillations, violating the expected continuous scale invariance in the system. We find that the breakdown of continuous scale invariance, due to Efimov physics, manifests also in the earliest stages of evolution after the interaction quench to unitarity, where we find the growth of a substantial population of Efimov states for densities in which the interparticle distance is comparable to the size of an Efimov state. This agrees with the early-time dynamical growth of three-body correlations at unitarity [Colussi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 100401 (2018)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.120.100401]. By varying the sweep rate away from unitarity, we also find a departure from the usual Landau-Zener analysis for state transfer when the system is allowed to evolve at unitarity and develop correlations.

H. W. L. Naus, John A. Tjon