No Arabic abstract
Recently we have reported (Knoop et al. [arXiv:1404.4826]) on an experimental determination of metastable triplet $^4$He+$^{87}$Rb scattering length by performing thermalization measurements for an ultracold mixture in a quadrupole magnetic trap. Here we present our experimental apparatus and elaborate on these thermalization measurements. In particular we give a theoretical description of interspecies thermalization rate for a quadrupole magnetic trap, i. e. in the presence of Majorana heating, and a general procedure to extract the scattering length from the elastic cross section at finite temperature based on knowledge of the $C_6$ coefficient alone. In addition, from our thermalization data we obtain an upper limit of the total interspecies two-body loss rate coefficient of $1.5times 10^{-12}$ cm$^3$s$^{-1}$.
We have investigated the ultracold interspecies scattering properties of metastable triplet He and Rb. We performed state-of-the-art ab initio calculations of the relevant interaction potential, and measured the interspecies elastic cross section for an ultracold mixture of metastable triplet $^4$He and $^{87}$Rb in a quadrupole magnetic trap at a temperature of 0.5 mK. Our combined theoretical and experimental study gives an interspecies scattering length $a_{4+87}=+17^{+1}_{-4}$ $a_0$, which prior to this work was unknown. More general, our work shows the possibility of obtaining accurate scattering lengths using ab initio calculations for a system containing a heavy, many-electron atom, such as Rb.
We have experimentally studied the magnetic-field dependence of the decay of a Bose-Einstein condensate of metastable 4He atoms confined in an optical dipole trap, for atoms in the m=+1 and m=-1 magnetic substates, and up to 450 G. Our measurements confirm long-standing calculations of the two-body loss rate coefficient that show an increase above 50 G. We demonstrate that for m=-1 atoms, decay is due to three-body recombination only, with a three-body loss rate coefficient of 6.5(0.4)(0.6)10^(-27)cm^6s^(-1), which is interesting in the context of universal few-body theory. We have also searched for a recently-predicted d-wave Feshbach resonance, but did not observe it.
We demonstrate coherent control of both the rotational and hyperfine state of ultracold, chemically stable $^{87}$Rb$^{133}$Cs molecules with external microwave fields. We create a sample of ~2000 molecules in the lowest hyperfine level of the rovibronic ground state N = 0. We measure the transition frequencies to 8 different hyperfine levels of the N = 1 state at two magnetic fields ~23 G apart. We determine accurate values of rotational and hyperfine coupling constants that agree well with previous calculations. We observe Rabi oscillations on each transition, allowing complete population transfer to a selected hyperfine level of N = 1. Subsequent application of a second microwave pulse allows transfer of molecules back to a different hyperfine level of N = 0.
In an ultracold, optically trapped mixture of $^{87}$Rb and metastable triplet $^4$He atoms we have studied trap loss for different spin-state combinations, for which interspecies Penning ionization is the main two-body loss process. We observe long trapping lifetimes for the purely quartet spin-state combination, indicating strong suppression of Penning ionization loss by at least two orders of magnitude. For the other spin-mixtures we observe short lifetimes that depend linearly on the doublet character of the entrance channel. We compare the extracted loss rate coefficient with recent predictions of multichannel quantum-defect theory for reactive collisions involving a strong exothermic loss channel and find near-universal loss for doublet scattering. Our work demonstrates control of reactive collisions by internal atomic state preparation.
The simultaneous presence of two competing inter-particle interactions can lead to the emergence of new phenomena in a many-body system. Among others, such effects are expected in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates, subject to dipole-dipole interaction and short-range repulsion. Magnetic quantum gases and in particular Dysprosium gases, offering a comparable short-range contact and a long-range dipolar interaction energy, remarkably exhibit such emergent phenomena. In addition an effective cancellation of mean-field effects of the two interactions results in a pronounced importance of quantum-mechanical beyond mean-field effects. For a weakly-dominant dipolar interaction the striking consequence is the existence of a new state of matter equilibrated by the balance between weak mean-field attraction and beyond mean-field repulsion. Though exemplified here in the case of dipolar Bose gases, this state of matter should appear also with other microscopic interactions types, provided a competition results in an effective cancellation of the total mean-field. The macroscopic state takes the form of so-called quantum droplets. We present the effects of a long-range dipolar interaction between these droplets.