Collisional stability of fermionic Feshbach molecules

TL;DR

This paper investigates the collisional stability of ultracold fermionic molecules created via Feshbach resonance, highlighting how quantum statistics influence molecular lifetimes and inelastic loss rates.

Contribution

It demonstrates the creation of fermionic molecules from a Bose-Fermi mixture and explores how quantum statistics affect their collisional stability.

Findings

Molecular lifetimes up to 100 ms near Feshbach resonance.

Quantum statistics significantly influence inelastic collision rates.

The system provides insights into few-body collision dynamics.

Abstract

Using a Feshbach resonance, we create ultracold fermionic molecules starting from a Bose-Fermi atom gas mixture. The resulting mixture of atoms and weakly bound molecules provides a rich system for studying few-body collisions because of the variety of atomic collision partners for molecules; either bosonic, fermionic, or distinguishable atoms. Inelastic loss of the molecules near the Feshbach resonance is dramatically affected by the quantum statistics of the colliding particles and the scattering length. In particular, we observe a molecule lifetime as long as 100 ms near the Feshbach resonance.