Three fully polarized fermions close to a p-wave Feshbach resonance

TL;DR

This paper investigates the three-body problem of identical fermions near a p-wave Feshbach resonance, providing analytical and numerical predictions for bound states, scattering properties, and recombination rates relevant to experiments.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive analysis of three fermions near a p-wave resonance, including effects of background interactions and universality of certain quantities.

Findings

Existence of weakly bound trimers with finite lifetime

Predicted atom-dimer scattering length and volume

Estimated recombination rates for inelastic processes

Abstract

We study the three-body problem for three atomic fermions, in the same spin state, experiencing a resonant interaction in the p-wave channel via a Feshbach resonance represented by a two-channel model. The rate of inelastic processes due to recombination to deeply bound dimers is then estimated from the three-body solution using a simple prescription. We obtain numerical and analytical predictions for most of the experimentally relevant quantities that can be extracted from the three-body solution: the existence of weakly bound trimers and their lifetime, the low-energy elastic and inelastic scattering properties of an atom on a weakly bound dimer (including the atom-dimer scattering length and scattering volume), and the recombination rates for three colliding atoms towards weakly bound and deeply bound dimers. The effect of "background" non-resonant interactions in the open channel of the two-channel model is also calculated and allows to determine which three-body quantities are `universal' and which on the contrary depend on the details of the model.