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Physical Review Letters

Suppression of Atomic Radiative Collisions by Tuning the Ground State Scattering Length

Vladan Vuletić, Cheng Chin, Andrew J. Kerman, Steven Chu

Published Aug 2, 1999• 49 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate the radiative collision rate in an ultracold, optically trapped cesium gas near a magnetically tunable Feshbach resonance. The radiative trap loss is suppressed by a factor of up to 15 when the node of the ground state pair correlation function is tuned to the Condon point. This constitutes a direct measurement of both the sign and the magnitude of the $s$-wave scattering length. In addition, we observe several narrow, superimposed loss resonances. Their widths are determined by the gas temperature, and their positions are independent of external parameters to within 5 mG.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.83.943

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We investigate the radiative collision rate in an ultracold, optically trapped cesium gas near a magnetically tunable Feshbach resonance. The radiative trap loss is suppressed by a factor of up to 15 when the node of the ground state pair correlation function is tuned to the Condon point. This constitutes a direct measurement of both the sign and the magnitude of the sss-wave scattering length. In addition, we observe several narrow, superimposed loss resonances. Their widths are determined by the gas temperature, and their positions are independent of external parameters to within 5 mG.
It is possible to tune the scattering length for the collision of ultracold ground-state alkaline-earth-metal atoms using an optical Feshbach resonance. This is achieved with a laser far detuned from an excited molecular level near the frequency of the atomic intercombination transition. Simple resonant-scattering theory, illustrated by the example of , allows an estimate of the magnitude of the effect. Unlike alkali metal species, large changes of the scattering length are possible while atom loss remains small, because of the very narrow linewidth of the molecular photoassociation transition. This raises prospects for control of atomic interactions for a system without magnetically tunable Feshbach resonance levels.
It is crucial to control the collision between ultracold atoms by applying external fields. We developed a theoretical model for investigating the s-wave scattering of ultracold atoms controlled by the magnetic field and laser field. The calculation is performed by using the close-coupling method and mapped Fourier grid method. Due to the interference between the photoassociation and bound-to-bound transitions, the bound state in the continuum, which is a resonance with a vanishing width, occurs at the magnetic field position near the magnetic Feshbach resonance. The widths of resonances in the neighborhood of the bound state in the continuum are narrow. Changing the laser intensity can shift the magnetic field position where the bound state in the continuum occurs through modifying the ground molecular state to induce wide resonances at desired magnetic field positions. By increasing the resonance width, the tunability of the real part of the scattering length at resonances can be significantly improved. Changing the laser intensity can also adjust the coupling between the ground and excited molecular states. When the coupling between the ground and excited molecular states approaches zero, a resonance is induced, and the photoassociation and bound-to-bound transitions are both significantly suppressed at this resonance. Therefore, the atomic loss peak due to spontaneous emission does not appear at this resonance. The magnetic field position of this resonance is stable against the change in laser frequency.
We study collisions in an optically trapped, pure sample of ultracold Cs 2 molecules in various internal states. The molecular gas is created by Feshbach association from a near-degenerate atomic gas, with adjustable temperatures in the nanokelvin range. We identify several narrow loss resonances, which point to the coupling to more complex molecular states and may be interpreted as Feshbach resonances in dimerdimer interactions. Moreover, in some molecular states we observe a surprising temperature dependence in collisional loss. This shows that the situation cannot be understood in terms of the usual simple threshold behavior for inelastic two-body collisions. We interpret this observation as further evidence for a more complex molecular structure beyond the well-understood dimer physics.
Ultracold atomic gases have realized numerous paradigms of condensed matter physics, where control over interactions has crucially been afforded by tunable Feshbach resonances. So far, the characterization of these Feshbach resonances has almost exclusively relied on experiments in the threshold regime near zero energy. Here, we use a laser-based collider to probe a narrow magnetic Feshbach resonance of rubidium above threshold. By measuring the overall atomic loss from colliding clouds as a function of magnetic field, we track the energy-dependent resonance position. At higher energy, our collider scheme broadens the loss feature, making the identification of the narrow resonance challenging. However, we observe that the collisions give rise to shifts in the center-of-mass positions of outgoing clouds. The shifts cross zero at the resonance and this allows us to accurately determine its location well above threshold. Our inferred resonance positions are in excellent agreement with theory.Studies on energy-dependent scattering of ultracold atoms were previously carried out near zero collision energies. Here, the authors observe a magnetic Feshbach resonance in ultracold Rb collisions for above-threshold energies and their method can also be used to detect higher partial wave resonances.
We have observed optically induced Feshbach resonances in a cold ( <1 mK) sodium vapor. The optical coupling of the ground and excited-state potentials changes the scattering properties of an ultracold gas in much the same way as recently observed magnetically induced Feshbach resonances, but allows for some experimental conveniences associated with using lasers. The scattering properties can be varied by changing either the intensity or the detuning of a laser tuned near a photoassociation transition to a molecular state in the dimer. In principle this method allows the scattering length of any atomic species to be altered. A simple model is used to fit the dispersive resonance line shapes.
We present expressions demonstrating that collisional decoherence of ultracold atoms or molecules in a coherent superposition of nondegenerate quantum states is suppressed when both the real and imaginary parts of the scattering lengths for the states in the coherent superposition are equal. We show that the rate of collisional decoherence can be enhanced or suppressed by varying an external magnetic field near a Feshbach resonance. For some resonances, the suppression is very dramatic. We propose a method for measuring the scattering length of ultracold particles in excited quantum states exhibiting Feshbach resonances.