• Media type: Text; E-Article
  • Title: Energy scaling of the product state distribution for three-body recombination of ultracold atoms
  • Contributor: Haze, Shinsuke [Author]; D'Incao, José P. [Author]; Dorer, Dominik [Author]; Li, Jinglun [Author]; Deiß, Markus [Author]; Tiemann, Eberhard [Author]; Julienne, Paul S. [Author]; Denschlag, Johannes Hecker [Author]
  • Published: College Park, MD : APS, 2023
  • Published in: Physical Review Research / American Physical Society 5 (2023), Nr. 1 ; Physical Review Research / American Physical Society
  • Issue: published Version
  • Language: English
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.15488/14890; https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevresearch.5.013161
  • Keywords: Energy scaling ; Energy dependency ; Formation rates ; Diatomic molecules ; Molecules
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  • Description: Three-body recombination is a chemical reaction where the collision of three atoms leads to the formation of a diatomic molecule. In the ultracold regime it is expected that the production rate of a molecule generally decreases with its binding energy Eb, however, its precise dependence and the physics governing it have been left unclear so far. Here we present a comprehensive experimental and theoretical study of the energy dependency for three-body recombination of ultracold Rb. For this, we determine production rates for molecules in a state-to-state resolved manner, with the binding energies Eb ranging from 0.02 to 77 GHz×h. We find that the formation rate approximately scales as Eb-α, where α is in the vicinity of 1. The formation rate typically varies only within a factor of two for different rotational angular momenta of the molecular product, apart from a possible centrifugal barrier suppression for low binding energies. In addition to numerical three-body calculations we present a perturbative model which reveals the physical origin of the energy scaling of the formation rate. Furthermore, we show that the scaling law potentially holds universally for a broad range of interaction potentials.
  • Access State: Open Access