arXiv:cond-mat/0604183 · Physical Review A
Collisional relaxation of Feshbach molecules and three-body recombination in Rb87 Bose-Einstein condensates
G. Smirne, R. M. Godun, Donatella Cassettari, Vincent Boyer, Christopher J. Foot, Thomas Volz, Niels Syassen, Stephan Dürr, Gerhard Rempe, M. D. Lee, Krzysztof Góral, Thorsten Köhler
Abstract
We predict the resonance-enhanced magnetic field dependence of atom-dimer relaxation and three-body recombination rates in a $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ Bose-Einstein condensate close to $1007\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{G}$. Our exact treatments of three-particle scattering explicitly include the dependence of the interactions on the atomic Zeeman levels. The Feshbach resonance distorts the entire diatomic energy spectrum, causing interferences in both loss phenomena. Our two independent experiments confirm the predicted recombination loss over a range of rate constants that spans four orders of magnitude.