We demonstrate that scattering of particles strongly interacting in three dimensions (3D) can be suppressed at low energies in a quasi-one-dimensional (1D) confinement. The underlying mechanism is the interference of the s- and p-wave scattering contributions with large s- and p-wave 3D scattering lengths being a necessary prerequisite. This low-dimensional quantum scattering effect might be useful in "interacting" quasi-1D ultracold atomic gases, guided atom interferometry, and impurity scattering in strongly confined quantum wire-based electronic devices.
We calculate the energy-level shifts of a tightly confined trapped alkali-metal atom in the presence of a second trapped atom. A complete microscopic description of the interaction energy between the two atoms is used. This allows us to study tightly confined atoms near a Feshbach resonance and to evaluate the usefulness of the regularized $\ensuremath{\delta}$-function potential approximation. We present results for sodium and cesium when confined in a spherically symmetric harmonic optical trap. Possible implications of the level shifts and collisional decoherence for quantum computing with atomic systems are given.
We studied the scattering problem of two distinguishable atoms with unequal mass, where one atom (atom $\ensuremath{\alpha}$) is trapped in a quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) tube and the other one (atom $\ensuremath{\beta}$) is localized by a 3D harmonic trap. We show that in such a system if atom $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ is much heavier than $\ensuremath{\beta}$, confinement-induced resonance (CIR) can appear when the 3D
s-wave scattering length
as of these two atoms is much smaller than the characteristic lengths (CLs) of the confinements, for either
as>0 or
as<0. This is quite different from the usual CIRs which occur only when
as is comparable with the CL of confinement. Moreover, the CIRs we find are broad enough to serve as a tool for the control of effective interatomic interaction. We further show the mechanism of these CIRs via the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Our results can be used for the realization of strongly interacting systems with ultracold atoms with weak 3D background interaction (i.e., small
as), e.g., the realization of ultracold gases with strong spin-dependent interaction at zero magnetic fields.