English

Coherent molecule formation in anharmonic potentials near confinement-induced resonances

Quantum Gases 2015-06-15 v1

Abstract

We perform a theoretical and experimental study of a system of two ultracold atoms with tunable interaction in an elongated trapping potential. We show that the coupling of center-of-mass and relative motion due to an anharmonicity of the trapping potential leads to a coherent coupling of a state of an unbound atom pair and a molecule with a center of mass excitation. By performing the experiment with exactly two particles we exclude three-body losses and can therefore directly observe coherent molecule formation. We find quantitative agreement between our theory of inelastic confinement-induced resonances and the experimental results. This shows that the effects of center-of-mass to relative motion coupling can have a significant impact on the physics of quasi-1D quantum systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1303.1844,
  title  = {Coherent molecule formation in anharmonic potentials near confinement-induced resonances},
  author = {S. Sala and G. Zürn and T. Lompe and A. N. Wenz and S. Murmann and F. Serwane and S. Jochim and A. Saenz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.1844},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures