Interaction induced decay of a heteronuclear two-atom system
Abstract
Two-atom systems in small traps are of fundamental interest, first of all for understanding the role of interactions in degenerate cold gases and for the creation of quantum gates in quantum information processing with single-atom traps. One of the key quantities is the inelastic relaxation (decay) time when one of the atoms or both are in a higher hyperfine state. Here we measure this quantity in a heteronuclear system of Rb and Rb in a micro optical trap and demonstrate experimentally and theoretically the presence of both fast and slow relaxation processes, depending on the choice of the initial hyperfine states. The developed experimental method allows us to single out a particular relaxation process and, in this sense, our experiment is a "superclean platform" for collisional physics studies. Our results have also implications for engineering of quantum states via controlled collisions and creation of two-qubit quantum gates.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1502.06053,
title = {Interaction induced decay of a heteronuclear two-atom system},
author = {Peng Xu and Jiaheng Yang and Min Liu and Xiaodong He and Yong Zeng and Kunpeng Wang and Jin Wang and D. J. Papoular and G. V. Shlyapnikov and Mingsheng Zhan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.06053},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
8 pages, 3 figures