Dissociation dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate of molecules

TL;DR

This paper explores the quantum dynamics of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates, revealing how bosonic and fermionic atoms influence dissociation processes through Bose-enhancement and Pauli-blocking effects.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of how quantum statistics affect molecular dissociation, highlighting phenomena like stimulated dissociation and incomplete dissociation due to quantum effects.

Findings

Bosonic atoms lead to stimulated dissociation via Bose-enhancement.

Fermionic atoms cause Pauli-blocking, resulting in incomplete dissociation.

Transient oscillations between molecules and atom pairs are observed.

Abstract

An unstable condensate of diatomic molecules will coherently disassociate into correlated pairs of atoms. This dissociation process exhibits very rich quantum dynamics depending on the quantum statistics of the constituent atoms. We show that in the case of bosonic atoms Bose-enhancement can lead to stimulated dissociation, whereas, in the case of fermions Pauli-blocking of the available states and a build-up of coherence between molecules and atom pairs can give rise to incomplete dissociation of the molecules and transient association-dissociation oscillations.