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Few-Body Systems

Efimov States in an Ultracold Gas: How it Happened in the Laboratory

Rudolf Grimm

Published Mar 23, 2019• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In the year 2005, we obtained first evidence for the existence of weakly bound quantum states of three resonantly interacting particles, as predicted 35 years earlier by Vitaly Efimov. In our laboratory, the striking signature of an Efimov state was a giant three-body loss resonance observed in a gas of cesium atoms that was evaporatively cooled to temperatures of about 10 nanokelvin. Here, I will give a short personal account on what prepared the ground for this observation, on how things finally happened in our laboratory, and on how our experiments then developed further.

DOI
10.1007/s00601-019-1495-y

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In the year 2005, we obtained first evidence for the existence of weakly bound quantum states of three resonantly interacting particles, as predicted 35 years earlier by Vitaly Efimov. In our laboratory, the striking signature of an Efimov state was a giant three-body loss resonance observed in a gas of cesium atoms that was evaporatively cooled to temperatures of about 10 nanokelvin. Here, I will give a short personal account on what prepared the ground for this observation, on how things finally happened in our laboratory, and on how our experiments then developed further.
Three interacting particles form a system which is well known for its complex physical behavior. A landmark theoretical result in few-body quantum physics is Efimov's prediction of a universal set of weakly bound trimer states appearing for three identical bosons with a resonant two-body interaction. Surprisingly, these states even exist in the absence of a corresponding two-body bound state and their precise nature is largely independent of the particular type of the two-body interaction potential. Efimov's scenario has attracted great interest in many areas of physics; an experimental test however has not been achieved. We report the observation of an Efimov resonance in an ultracold thermal gas of cesium atoms. The resonance occurs in the range of large negative two-body scattering lengths and arises from the coupling of three free atoms to an Efimov trimer. We observe its signature as a giant three-body recombination loss when the strength of the two-body interaction is varied near a Feshbach resonance. This resonance develops into a continuum resonance at non-zero collision energies, and we observe a shift of the resonance position as a function of temperature. We also report on a minimum in the recombination loss for positive scattering lengths, indicating destructive interference of decay pathways. Our results confirm central theoretical predictions of Efimov physics and represent a starting point from which to explore the universal properties of resonantly interacting few-body systems.
Since the early days of quantum physics, the complex behavior of three interacting particles has been the subject of numerous experimental and theoretical studies. In a recent Letter to Nature, Kraemer et al. [Nature (London) 440, 315 (2006)] report on experimental ``evidence for Efimov quantum states'' in an ultracold gas of cesium atoms. Such quantum states refer to an infinite series of energy levels of three identical Bose particles, accumulating at the threshold for dissociation as the scattering length of each pair is tuned to infinity. Whereas the existence of a single Efimov state has been predicted for three helium atoms, earlier experimental studies concluded that this elusive state had not been found. In this paper we show by an intuitive argument and full numerical calculations that the helium and cesium experiments actually provide evidence of the same, ground state of this trimer spectrum, which the helium experimentalists and pioneering theoretical studies had not associated with Efimov's effect. Unlike the helium trimer, the observed 133Cs3^{133}\mathrm{Cs}_{3}133Cs3​ resonance refers to a Borromean molecular state. We discuss how as yet unobserved, excited Efimov quantum states might be detected in ultracold gases of 85Rb^{85}\mathrm{Rb}85Rb and of 133Cs^{133}\mathrm{Cs}133Cs at magnetic field strengths in the vicinity of 0.08T0.08\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{T}0.08T (800G)(800\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{G})(800G).
We report the observation of a three-body recombination resonance in an ultracold gas of cesium atoms at a very large negative value of the s-wave scattering length.The resonance is identified as the second triatomic Efimov resonance, which corresponds to the situation where the first excited Efimov state appears at the threshold of three free atoms.This observation, together with a finite-temperature analysis and the known first resonance, allows the most accurate demonstration to date of the discrete scaling behavior at the heart of Efimov physics.For the system of three identical bosons, we obtain a scaling factor of 21.0(1.3),close to the ideal value of 22.7.
Efimov's prediction more than three decades ago that three-body bound states can exist when the pairwise attractions do not bind or only support weakly bound states of a pair, has remained unconfirmed till just the past year. This lecture provides the pedagogical background for recent work on Efimov states in neutron-rich nuclei done with I. Mazumdar (TIFR) and V. S. Bhasin (Delhi University), and published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 062503 (2006). Both these nuclear systems and recent observations of cold cesium atoms provide the first clear evidence for the existence of Efimov states.
We are developing theoretical and computational methods to study two related three-body processes in ultracold quantum gases: three-body resonances and three-body recombination. Three-body recombination causes the ultracold gas to heat up and atoms to leave the trap where they are confined. Therefore, it is an undesirable effect in the process of forming ultracold quantum gases. Metastable three-body states (resonances) are formed in the ultracold gas. When decaying they also give additional kinetic energy to the gas, that leads to the heating too. In addition, a reliable method to obtain three-body resonances would be useful in a number of problems in other fields of physics, for example, in models of metastable nuclei or to study dissociative recombination of H3 +. Our project consists of employing computer modeling to develop a method to obtain three-body resonances. The method uses a novel two-step diagonalization approach to solve the three-body Schrödinger equation. The approach employs the SVD method of Tolstikhin et al. coupled with a complex absorbing potential. We tested this method on a model system of three identical bosons with nucleon mass and compared it to the results of a previous study. This model can be employed to understand the 3He nucleus . We found one three-body bound state and four resonances. We are also studying Efimov resonances using a 4He-based model. In a system of identical spinless bosons, Efimov states are a series of loosely bound three-body states which begin to appear as the energy of the two-body bound state approaches zero . Although they were predicted 35 years ago, recent evidence of Efimov states found by Kraemer et al. in a gas of ultracold Cs atoms has sparked great interest by theorists and experimentalists. Efimov resonances are a kind of pre-dissociated Efimov trimer. To search for Efimov resonances we tune the diatom interaction potential, V(r): V(r) → λV(r) as Esry et al. did . We calculated the first two values of λ for which there is a "condensation" (infinite number) of Efimov states. They are λEfimov1 = 0.9765 and λEfimov2 = 6.834. We performed calculations for λ = 2.4, but found no evidence of Efimov resonances. For future work we plan to work with λ ≈ 4 and λ ≈ λEfimov2 where we might see d-wave and higher l-wave Efimov resonances. There is also a many-body project that forms part of this thesis and consists of a direct diagonalization of the Bogolyubov Hamiltonian, which describes elementary excitations of a gas of bosons interacting through a pairwise interaction. We would like to reproduce the corresponding energy spectrum. So far we have performed several convergence tests, but have not observed the desired energy spectrum. We show preliminary results.
We report the observation of a three-body recombination resonance in an ultracold gas of cesium atoms at a very large negative value of the s-wave scattering length. The resonance is identified as the second triatomic Efimov resonance, which corresponds to the situation where the first excited Efimov state appears at the threshold of three free atoms. This observation, together with a finite-temperature analysis and the known first resonance, allows the most accurate demonstration to date of the discrete scaling behavior at the heart of Efimov physics. For the system of three identical bosons, we obtain a scaling factor of 21.0(1.3), close to the ideal value of 22.7.