Molecular production in two-component atomic Fermi gases

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical method for molecular production in degenerate Fermi gases using Feshbach resonance sweeps, highlighting the role of the Landau-Zener parameter and explaining observed saturation effects.

Contribution

It introduces a pairwise summation approach to predict molecular production efficiency, aligning with experimental results without adjustable parameters.

Findings

Molecular production efficiency depends on the Landau-Zener parameter and gas density.

The approach explains the saturation of molecular yield observed in experiments.

The model accurately reproduces experimental atomic loss curves.

Abstract

We provide a practical approach to the molecular production via linear downward sweeps of Feshbach resonances in degenerate Fermi gases containing incoherent mixtures of two atomic spin states. We show that the efficiency of the association of atoms is determined just by the Landau-Zener parameter in addition to the density of the gas. Our approach of pairwise summation of the microscopic binary transition probabilities leads to an intuitive explanation for the observed saturation of the molecular production and recovers all atomic loss curves of C.A. Regal et al. [Nature (London) 427, 47 (2003)] as well as K.E. Strecker et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 080406 (2003)] without adjustable parameters.