Efimov physics and more: the ultracold few-body problem

José Paulo D'Incao, Yujun Wang, Brett D. Esry

José Paulo D'Incao, Jia Wang, Yujun Wang +1 more

Yusuke Nishida

Dmitry S. Petrov

This chapter discusses the few-body problem, which plays a very important role in the physics of ultracold gases. It describes the structure of molecules and their formation in three-body collisions (three-body recombination), atom-molecule and molecule-molecule collisional properties, structure of trimers and larger clusters, numerous phenomena that go under the name of Efimov physics, and many other problems. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 3.2 discusses the effective range expansion for the two-body scattering amplitude and puts a special emphasis on the role of the resonance width. Section 3.3 applies the zero-range approach to the problem of three atoms. It considers the phenomenon of the three-body collapse, or Thomas collapse, and defines the Efimov effect. Then, it introduces a model system of one light and two heavy atoms, where we can use the Born‐Oppenheimer approximation. Section 3.4 describes the method of Skorniakov and Ter‐Martirosian (STM) for few-body problems with resonant short-range interactions. Section 3.5 considers other rapidly developing directions in theoretical few-atom physics.

Brett D. Esry, José Paulo D'Incao

L. J. Wacker, Nils B. Jørgensen, Dorthe Birkmose +5 more

Ultracold atomic gases have recently become a driving force in few-body physics due to the observation of the Efimov effect. While initially observed in equal mass systems, one expects even richer few-body physics in the heteronuclear case. In previous experiments with ultracold mixtures of potassium and rubidium, an unexpected nonuniversal behavior of Efimov resonances was observed. In contrast, we measure the scattering length dependent three-body recombination coefficient in ultracold heteronuclear mixtures of ^{39}K-^{87}Rb and ^{41}K-^{87}Rb and do not observe any signatures of Efimov resonances for accessible scattering lengths in either mixture. Our results show good agreement with our theoretical model for the scattering dependent three-body recombination coefficient and reestablish universality across isotopic mixtures.