Heidelberg 2015 – scientific programme
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SYEP: Symposium Efimov Physics
SYEP 1: Symposium Efimov Physics I
SYEP 1.3: Talk
Monday, March 23, 2015, 12:30–12:45, C/gHS
Observation of the Efimov state of the helium trimer — •Maksim Kunitski1, Stefan Zeller1, Jörg Voigtsberger1, Anton Kalinin1, Lothar Schmidt1, Markus Schöffler1, Achim Czasch1, Wieland Schöllkopf2, Robert E. Grisenti1, Till Jahnke1, Dörte Blume3, and Reinhard Dörner1 — 1IKF, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main — 2Fritz-Haber-Institut, Berlin — 3Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA
In 1970 Vitali Efimov predicted remarkable counterintuitive behavior of a three-body system made up of identical bosons. Namely, a weakening of pair interaction in such a system brings about in the limit appearance of infinite number of bound states. These three-body states possess universal properties, which are determined primarily by the s-wave scattering length and a single three-body parameter but do not depend on a particular short-range interaction. Helium trimer has been suggested to be an only native molecular system having an excite state of Efimov nature. Though many theoretical works predict the existence of this state in Helium trimer, it has not been observed experimentally so far. Here we report the first experimental observation of the excited state of He trimer by means of Coulomb explosion imaging. We show spatial images of an Efimov state, confirming the predicted size and a structure where two atoms are close to each other with the third one being far away. This structure is believed to be universal to all Efimov systems from nuclear and atomic physics to condensed matter and biology.