2005/08/08 by C. Ryu, Changhyun Ryu, X. Du +13 · 3 citations
Chemistry · Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Other Condensed Matter (cond-mat.other) #Spectroscopy and Laser Applications #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #cond-mat.other #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0508201
14 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2005/08/08 · openalex publication_date 2005/08/08 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It has recently been demonstrated that quantum degenerate gases of very weakly bound molecules can be produced by atomic gases with Feshbach resonances. More strongly bound molecules can be produced with Raman photoassociation of a quantum gas, although this process has not yet been shown to produce a quantum degenerate molecular gas. In principle, Feshbach resonance and Raman photoassociation can be quantum-mechanically reversible, and lead to collective coherent phenomena such as Rabi cycling between an atomic and a molecular gas. However, such atom-molecular coherence has only partly been realized experimentally. Effects that may limit coherence include thermalizing elastic collisions, inelastic collisions, spontaneous Raman scattering, and pairing field formation. Here, we demonstrate a method that circumvents these limitations, based on Raman photoassociation of atoms in an optical lattice and driven into a Mott insulator state. We find that the Raman photoassociation transition is resolved into discrete lines corresponding to the quantized lattice site occupancies, and demonstrate that this provides a new method to accurately determine the distribution of site occupancies and the atom-molecule scattering length. Furthermore, we observe a Raman-induced oscillation of the central core of the gas, containing about 30% of the atoms, between an atomic and a molecular gas.