9 research outputs found
Controlling the nature of a charged impurity in a bath of Feshbach dimers
We theoretically study the dynamics of a trapped ion that is immersed in an
ultracold gas of weakly bound atomic dimers created by a Feshbach resonance.
Using quasi-classical simulations, we find a crossover from dimer dissociation
to molecular ion formation depending on the binding energy of the dimers. The
location of the crossover strongly depends on the collision energy and the
time-dependent fields of the Paul trap. Deeply bound dimers lead to fast
molecular ion formation, with rates approaching the Langevin collision rate
cms. The kinetic energies
of the created molecular ions have a median below mK, such that they will
stay confined in the ion trap. We conclude that interacting ions and Feshbach
molecules may provide a novel approach towards the creation of ultracold
molecular ions with applications in precision spectroscopy and quantum
chemistry.Comment: 9 pages and 12 figures including appendice
Observation of a Strong Atom-Dimer Attraction in a Mass-Imbalanced Fermi-Fermi Mixture
We investigate a mixture of ultracold fermionic K atoms and weakly
bound LiK dimers on the repulsive side of a heteronuclear atomic
Feshbach resonance. By radio-frequency spectroscopy we demonstrate that the
normally repulsive atom-dimer interaction is turned into a strong attraction.
The phenomenon can be understood as a three-body effect in which two heavy
K fermions exchange the light Li atom, leading to attraction in
odd partial-wave channels (mainly p-wave). Our observations show that mass
imbalance in a fermionic system can profoundly change the character of
interactions as compared to the well-established mass-balanced case