Strong dissipation inhibits losses and induces correlations in cold molecular gases

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that strong inelastic collisions in ultracold molecular gases can suppress particle losses and induce strong correlations, enabling exploration of many-body quantum phenomena despite inelastic interactions.

Contribution

It reveals that strong inelastic collisions can inhibit losses and promote correlations, a counterintuitive finding that broadens the scope of strongly-correlated quantum gas research.

Findings

Particle loss rate reduced by a factor of 10 in 1D systems.

Loss reduction increases to a factor of 2000 with an added lattice.

Strong inelastic collisions can drive systems into correlated regimes.

Abstract

Atomic quantum gases in the strong-correlation regime offer unique possibilities to explore a variety of many-body quantum phenomena. Reaching this regime has usually required both strong elastic and weak inelastic interactions, as the latter produce losses. We show that strong inelastic collisions can actually inhibit particle losses and drive a system into a strongly-correlated regime. Studying the dynamics of ultracold molecules in an optical lattice confined to one dimension, we show that the particle loss rate is reduced by a factor of 10. Adding a lattice along the one dimension increases the reduction to a factor of 2000. Our results open up the possibility to observe exotic quantum many-body phenomena with systems that suffer from strong inelastic collisions.