Effects of Electric Fields on Heteronuclear Feshbach Resonances in Ultracold $^6\rm{Li}-^{87}\rm{Rb}$ Mixtures

TL;DR

This paper investigates how external electric and magnetic fields influence Feshbach resonances in ultracold Li-Rb mixtures, revealing electric fields can significantly shift, split, and generate resonances, offering new control methods for atomic interactions.

Contribution

It introduces the first detailed analysis of electric-field effects on heteronuclear Feshbach resonances, showing how electric fields can tune and produce resonance phenomena beyond magnetic control.

Findings

Electric fields shift Feshbach resonance positions.

Electric fields generate additional resonance channels.

Electric fields cause larger resonance splitting than magnetic dipole interactions.

Abstract

The effects of combined external electric and magnetic fields on elastic collisions in ultracold Li--Rb mixtures is studied using recently obtained, experimentally verified potentials. Our analysis provides both quantitative predictions for and a detailed physical interpretation of the phenomena arising from electric-field-induced interactions. It is shown that the electric field shifts the positions of intrinsic magnetic Feshbach resonances, generates copies of resonances previously restricted to a particular partial-wave collision to other partial wave channels, and splits Feshbach resonances into multiple resonances for states of non-zero angular momenta. It was recently observed that the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction can also lift the degeneracy of a p-wave state splitting the associated p-wave Feshbach resonance into two distinct resonances at different magnetic fields. Our work shows that the splitting of the resonances produced by an applied electric field is more than an order of magnitude larger. This new phenomenon offers a complementary way to produce and tune an anisotropic interaction and to study its effect on the many-body physics of heteronuclear atomic gases.