English

Observation of heteronuclear atomic Efimov resonances

Other Condensed Matter 2009-07-20 v1

Abstract

The Efimov effect represents a cornerstone in few-body physics. Building on the recent experimental observation with ultracold atoms, we report the first experimental signature of Efimov physics in a heteronuclear system. A mixture of 41^{41}K and 87^{87}Rb atoms was cooled to few hundred nanoKelvins and stored in an optical dipole trap. Exploiting a broad interspecies Feshbach resonance, the losses due to three-body collisions were studied as a function of the interspecies scattering length. We observe an enhancement of the three-body collisions for three distinct values of the interspecies scattering lengths, both positive and negative. We attribute the two features at negative scattering length to the existence of two kind of Efimov trimers, namely KKRb and KRbRb.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0901.4584,
  title  = {Observation of heteronuclear atomic Efimov resonances},
  author = {G. Barontini and C. Weber and F. Rabatti and J. Catani and G. Thalhammer and M. Inguscio and F. Minardi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0901.4584},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T12:05:45.562Z