Three-body recombination in a three-state Fermi gas with widely tunable interactions

We investigate the stability of a three spin state mixture of ultracold fermionic 6Li atoms over a range of magnetic fields encompassing three Feshbach resonances. For most field values, we attribute decay of the atomic population to three-body processes involving one atom from each spin state and f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2009-04, Vol.102 (16), p.165302-165302, Article 165302
Main Authors: Huckans, J H, Williams, J R, Hazlett, E L, Stites, R W, O'Hara, K M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSICS
FERMI GAS
FERMIONS
LITHIUM 6
MAGNETIC FIELDS
RECOMBINATION
SCATTERING LENGTHS
SPIN
STABILITY
SUPERFLUIDITY
THREE-BODY PROBLEM
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Summary:We investigate the stability of a three spin state mixture of ultracold fermionic 6Li atoms over a range of magnetic fields encompassing three Feshbach resonances. For most field values, we attribute decay of the atomic population to three-body processes involving one atom from each spin state and find that the three-body loss coefficient varies by over 4 orders of magnitude. We observe high stability when at least two of the three scattering lengths are small, rapid loss near the Feshbach resonances, and two unexpected resonant loss features. At our highest fields, where all pairwise scattering lengths are approaching a_{t}=-2140a_{0}, we measure a three-body loss coefficient L_{3} approximately 5x10;{-22} cm;{6}/s and a trend toward lower decay rates for higher fields indicating that future studies of color superfluidity and trion formation in a SU(3) symmetric Fermi gas may be feasible.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.165302