Physical Review A
Control of spin-exchange interaction between alkali-earth-metal atoms via confinement-induced resonances in a quasi-(1+0)-dimensional system
Ren Zhang, Peng Zhang
Abstract
A nuclear-spin-exchange interaction exists between two ultracold fermionic alkali-earth-metal-like atoms in the electronic ${}^{1}{S}_{0}$ state ($g$ state) and ${}^{3}{P}_{0}$ state ($e$ state) and is an essential ingredient for the quantum simulation of the Kondo effect. We study the control of this spin-exchange interaction for two atoms simultaneously confined in a quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) tube, where the $g$ atom is freely moving in the axial direction while the $e$ atom is further localized by an additional axial trap and behaves as a quasi-0D impurity. In this system, the two atoms experience effective 1D spin-exchange interactions in both even and odd partial-wave channels, whose intensities can be controlled by the characteristic lengths of the confinements via confinement-induced resonances (CIRs). In a previous work, we studied this problem with a simplified pure 1D model [Y. Cheng et al., Phys. Rev. A 96, 063605 (2017)]. In the present work, we go beyond that pure 1D approximation. We model the transverse and axial confinements by harmonic traps with finite characteristic lengths ${a}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}$ and ${a}_{z}$, respectively, and exactly solve the quasi-1D--quasi-0D scattering problem between these two atoms. Using the solutions, we derive the effective 1D spin-exchange interaction and investigate the locations and widths of the even-odd wave CIRs for our system. It is found that when the ratio ${a}_{z}/{a}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}$ is larger, the CIRs can be induced by weaker confinements, which are easier to be realized experimentally. The comparison between our results and a recent experiment by L. Riegger et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 143601 (2018)] shows that the two experimentally observed resonance branches of the spin-exchange effect are due to an even-wave CIR and an odd-wave CIR, respectively. Our results are advantageous for the control and description of either the effective spin-exchange interaction or other types of interactions between ultracold atoms in quasi-(1+0)-dimensional systems.