Hamburg 2009 – scientific programme

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 10: Ultracold atoms II: Single atoms (with Q)

A 10.5: Talk

Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 15:15–15:30, Audi-B

Efimov states in atom-molecular collisions — •Maxim A. Efremov¹, Lev Plimak¹, Misha Yu. Ivanov², Gora V. Shlyapnikov³, and Wolfgang P. Schleich¹ — ¹Institut für Quantenphysik, Universität Ulm, D-89069, Germany — ²Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences, NRC Canada, ON Ottawa, K1A 0R6 Canada — ³Laboratoire de Physique Theorique et Modeles Statistiques, CNRS, Universite Paris Sud, 91405 Orsay, France

Scattering of a heavy atom off a weakly bound molecule comprising an identical heavy and a light atom is considered. We focus on the experimentally favorable situation in which the heavy atoms are bosons and the light ones are fermions, and the molecules exist in a cold boson-fermion mixture due to an interspecies Feshbach resonance. The total cross section of atom-molecular scattering is calculated in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. In the limit of slow incident atom the total cross section as a function of the heavy-light s-wave scattering length (in experimental terms, as a function of the applied magnetic field) is shown to exhibit a series of resonances, providing a physically clear manifestation of the Efimov states in the three-body collision. Measurement of the cross section can therefore be an efficient and precise tool for scanning the effective potential in the three-body problem.