Collisions between tunable halo dimers: exploring an elementary four-body process with identical bosons

TL;DR

This paper investigates inelastic collisions of cesium Feshbach molecules in the quantum halo regime, revealing loss minima and temperature-dependent suppression, thus shedding light on four-boson quantum few-body physics.

Contribution

It provides experimental measurements of relaxation rates and loss features in a four-boson system with tunable interactions, advancing understanding of few-body quantum phenomena.

Findings

Identified a pronounced loss minimum at specific scattering lengths

Observed suppression of inelastic loss at lower temperatures

Measured relaxation rate coefficients across different conditions

Abstract

We study inelastic collisions in a pure, trapped sample of Feshbach molecules made of bosonic cesium atoms in the quantum halo regime. We measure the relaxation rate coefficient for decay to lower-lying molecular states and study the dependence on scattering length and temperature. We identify a pronounced loss minimum with varying scattering length along with a further suppression of loss with decreasing temperature. Our observations provide insight into the physics of a few-body quantum system that consists of four identical bosons at large values of the two-body scattering length.