SAMOP 2023 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 37: Collisions (with Q) (joint session MO/Q)
Q 37.4: Talk
Wednesday, March 8, 2023, 15:15–15:30, F142
Product spin and binding energy propensities for three-body recombination of ultracold atoms — •Jinglun Li1, Shinsuke Haze1, José P. D’Incao1,2, Dominik Dorer1, Markus Deiß1, Eberhard Tiemann3, Paul S. Julienne4, and Johannes Hecker Denschlag1 — 1Institut für Quantenmaterie, Universität Ulm, Germany — 2JILA, University of Colorado, USA — 3Institut für Quantenoptik, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany — 4JQI, University of Maryland, USA
Three-body recombination (TBR) is an elementary chemical reaction process, in which free atoms collide to form a molecule and release the binding energy Eb into the translational movement of the molecule and the third atom. Knowing favored molecular products in TBR is crucial for various fields such as astrophysics, atmospheric physics, and physical chemistry. In recent years we have been working experimentally and theoretically on TBR of ultracold atoms and have achieved great progress in identifying the molecular product distribution on a full quantum state resolution level. In particular, for ultracold Rb atoms we find that TBR intends to produce a molecule preserving the initial spins of two atoms that form it and that the state-to-state reaction rate follows roughly a power-law scaling L3 ∝ 1/Eb. Our numerical simulations predict that the 1/Eb propensity even holds, with a different prefactor, for two specific groups of molecular products disfavored by the spin propensity. We further elaborate a more comprehensive theoretical investigation on different alkali-metal species to explore the modifications and breakdowns of these propensities.