Resonant Manipulation of d-wave Interaction of Cold Atoms with Two Lasers and a Magnetic Field

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical method to manipulate d-wave interactions in cold atoms using two lasers and a magnetic field, enhancing elastic scattering and suppressing inelastic processes.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel theory predicting coherence between excited bound states, enabling control over d-wave interactions in cold atoms with practical implications.

Findings

Enhanced d-wave elastic scattering observed

Suppressed inelastic scattering rates achieved

Effective manipulation at low temperatures demonstrated

Abstract

We present a theory for manipulation of d-wave interaction of cold atoms with two lasers strongly driving two photoassociative transitions. The theory predicts the occurrence of a coherence between two excited ro-vibrational bound states due to the photoassociative dipole-couplings of ground-state d-wave scattering state to the bound states. We show that this excited-state coherence significantly influences atom-atom interaction. In particular, this leads to the enhancement of d-wave elastic scattering and to the suppression of inelastic scattering. In the presence of an s-wave magnetic Feshbach resonance, the two lasers can couple the s-wave resonance with the d-wave scattering state leading to the further enhancement in d-wave scattering at relatively low energy. Our numerical calculations based on realistic parameters show that d-wave manipulation would be most effective in case of atoms having excited diatomic states with narrow natural linewidth. We estimate that at 100 $\mu$K the inelastic scattering rate in Yb can be reduced to 20 s$^{-1}$ while the elastic scattering rate can be two orders of magnitude larger.