Tunable Fujita-Miyazawa-Type Three-Body Force in Ultracold Atoms

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how a Fujita-Miyazawa-type three-body force can be realized and tuned among impurity atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate, revealing an analogy with nuclear three-body interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a tunable three-body force in ultracold atoms inspired by nuclear physics, linking atomic polarons to nuclear few-body systems.

Findings

Effective three-body force emerges near Feshbach resonance

Force can be enhanced by magnetic field tuning

Strength measurable via impurity equation of state

Abstract

We show how a Fujita-Miyazawa-type three-body force emerges among three impurity atoms immersed in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate near an interspecies Feshbach resonance. As a result of thermal average over excitations in the medium and impurities as well as expansion with respect to the impurity-medium and Feshbach resonance couplings, two superfluid phonons and a closed channel resonance play a role in producing an effective three-body force, as in the original three-nucleon case in which two pions and a $\Delta$ resonance are involved. The proposed Fujita-Miyazawa-type three-body force can be enhanced by tuning the closed-channel energy level via an external magnetic field, and moreover, its strength can be confirmed experimentally by measuring the impurity equation of state. Our result gives a new insight into an analogy between atomic polarons and nuclear few-body systems.