We experimentally investigate the unitarity-limited behavior of the three-body loss near a
p-wave Feshbach resonance in a single-component Fermi gas of
6Li atoms. At the unitarity limit, the three-body loss coefficient
L3 exhibits universality in the sense that it is independent of the interaction strength and follows the predicted temperature scaling law of ${L}_{3}\ensuremath{\propto}{T}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$. When decreasing the interaction strength from the unitarity regime, the three-body loss coefficient as a function of the interaction strength and temperature can be described by the theory based on the association of an excited resonant quasibound state and its relaxation into a deep stable dimer by collision with a third atom in the framework of the standard Breit-Wigner theoretical approach. The results reported here are important to understand the properties of a resonant
p-wave Fermi gas in the prospect of quantum few- and many-body physics.
We derive the elastic collision rate for a harmonically trapped Fermi gas in the extreme unitarity limit where the s-wave scattering cross section is $\ensuremath{\sigma}(k)=4\ensuremath{\pi}{/k}^{2},$ with $\ensuremath{\Elzxh}k$ the relative momentum. The collision rate is given in the form $\ensuremath{\Gamma}=\ensuremath{\gamma}{I(T/T}_{F})$---the product of a universal collision rate $\ensuremath{\gamma}{=k}_{B}{T}_{F}/(6\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremath{\Elzxh})$ and a dimensionless function of the ratio of the temperature T to the Fermi temperature
TF. We find that I has a peak value of $\ensuremath{\simeq}4.6$ at ${T/T}_{F}\ensuremath{\simeq}0.4,$ $I\ensuremath{\simeq}82{(T/T}_{F}{)}^{2}$ for
T/TF< 0.15, and $I\ensuremath{\simeq}{2(T}_{F}{/T)}^{2}$ for
T/TF>1.5. We estimate the collision rate for recent experiments on a strongly-interacting degenerate Fermi gas of atoms.