Three-body loss rate of unitary Bose gas

Zoran Hadzibabic

Laura A. Zundel, Lin Xia, Joshua Wilson +2 more

Ulrich Eismann, Lev Khaykovich, Sébastien Laurent +8 more

The low-temperature unitary Bose gas is a fundamental paradigm in few-body and many-body physics, attracting wide theoretical and experimental interest. Here, we present experiments performed with unitary 133Cs and 7Li atoms in two different setups, which enable quantitative comparison of the three-body recombination rate in the low-temperature domain. We develop a theoretical model that describes the dynamic competition between two-body evaporation and three-body recombination in a harmonically trapped unitary atomic gas above the condensation temperature. We identify a universal "magic" trap depth where, within some parameter range, evaporative cooling is balanced by recombination heating and the gas temperature stays constant. Our model is developed for the usual three-dimensional evaporation regime as well as the two-dimensional evaporation case, and it fully supports our experimental findings. Combined 133Cs and 7Li experimental data allow investigations of loss dynamics over 2 orders of magnitude in temperature and 4 orders of magnitude in three-body loss rate. We confirm the 1/T2 temperature universality law. In particular, we measure, for the first time, the Efimov inelasticity parameter η*=0.098(7) for the 47.8-G d-wave Feshbach resonance in 133Cs. Our result supports the universal loss dynamics of trapped unitary Bose gases up to a single parameter η*.

Laura A. Zundel, Lin Xia, Jean-Félix Riou +1 more

Richard J. Fletcher, Alexander L. Gaunt, Nir Navon +2 more

We study the stability of a thermal (39)K Bose gas across a broad Feshbach resonance, focusing on the unitary regime, where the scattering length a exceeds the thermal wavelength λ. We measure the general scaling laws relating the particle-loss and heating rates to the temperature, scattering length, and atom number. Both at unitarity and for positive a<<λ we find agreement with three-body theory. However, for a<0 and away from unitarity, we observe significant four-body decay. At unitarity, the three-body loss coefficient, L(3) proportional λ(4), is 3 times lower than the universal theoretical upper bound. This reduction is a consequence of species-specific Efimov physics and makes (39)K particularly promising for studies of many-body physics in a unitary Bose gas.

Dane Hudson Smith, Eric Braaten, Daekyoung Kang +1 more

In a recent experiment with ultracold trapped Rb85 atoms, Makotyn et al. studied a quantum-degenerate Bose gas in the unitary limit where its scattering length is infinitely large. We show that the observed momentum distributions are compatible with a universal relation that expresses the high-momentum tail in terms of the two-body contact C2 and the three-body contact C3. We determine the contact densities for the unitary Bose gas with number density n to be C2 ≈ 20 n(4/3) and C3 ≈ 2n(5/3). We also show that the observed atom loss rate is compatible with that from 3-atom inelastic collisions, which gives a contribution proportional to C3, but the loss rate is not compatible with that from 2-atom inelastic collisions, which gives a contribution proportional to C2. We point out that the contacts C2 and C3 could be measured independently by using the virial theorem near and at unitarity, respectively.