We show how a Fujita-Miyazawa-type three-body force emerges among three impurity atoms immersed in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate near an interspecies Feshbach resonance. As a result of thermal average over excitations in the medium and impurities as well as expansion with respect to the impurity-medium and Feshbach resonance couplings, two superfluid phonons and a closed channel resonance play a role in producing an effective three-body force, as in the original three-nucleon case in which two pions and a
Δ resonance are involved. The proposed Fujita-Miyazawa-type three-body force can be enhanced by tuning the closed-channel energy level via an external magnetic field, and moreover, its strength can be confirmed experimentally by measuring the impurity equation of state. Our result gives a new insight into an analogy between atomic polarons and nuclear few-body systems.
Quantifying the nonuniversal three-body losses in ultracold atomic gases has been a long-standing problem. We go beyond earlier approaches to solve this problem by using a model that includes realistic pairwise interaction potentials and the exact three-atom spin structure. With this model we can successfully explain experimental observations for weakly interacting
7Li and
87Rb atoms. Capturing the exact spin structure, we are able to reveal a strong three-body spin-exchange recombination mechanism. In addition, we predict a regime of low three-body recombination rate in the
7Li system that is advantageous for a variety of many-body experiments. This work opens avenues to study spin-involved few-body processes in quantum gases.
I consider nonrelativistic bosons interacting via pairwise potentials with infinite scattering length and supporting no two-body bound states. To lowest order in effective field theory, these conditions lead to noninteracting bosons, since the coupling constant of the Lieb-Liniger model vanishes identically in this limit. Since any realistic pairwise interaction is not a mere delta function, the noninteracting picture is an idealization indicating that the effect of interactions is weaker than in the case of off-resonant potentials. I show that the leading-order correction to the ground-state energy for more than two bosons is accurately described by the lowest-order three-body force in effective field theory that arises due to the off-shell structure of the two-body interaction. For natural two-body interactions with a short-distance repulsive core and an attractive tail, the emergent three-body interaction is repulsive and, therefore, three bosons do not form any bound states. This situation is analogous to the two-dimensional repulsive Bose gas, when treated using the lowest-order contact interaction, where the scattering amplitude exhibits an unphysical Landau pole. The avoidance of this state in the three-boson problem proceeds in a way that parallels the two-dimensional case. These results pave the way for the experimental realization of one-dimensional Bose gases with pure three-body interactions using ultracold atoms.