2004/10/31 by Martin Stoll, Thorsten Koehler, Thorsten Köhler
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Frequency and Time Standards #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #cond-mat.other
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.72.022714
published as Phys. Rev. A 72, 022714 (2005) · 21 pages, 8 figures (final version)
arxiv created 2005/07/22 · openalex publication_date 2005/08/17 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the possibility of associating metastable Efimov trimers from three free Bose atoms in a tight trap realized, for instance, via an optical lattice site or a microchip. The suggested scheme for the production of these molecules is based on magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances and takes advantage of the Efimov effect in three-body energy spectra. Our predictions of the energy levels and wave functions of three pairwise interacting 85Rb atoms rely upon exact solutions of the Faddeev equations and include the tightly confining potential of an isotropic harmonic atom trap. The magnetic field dependence of these energy levels indicates that it is the lowest-energetic Efimov trimer state that can be associated in an adiabatic sweep of the field strength. We show that the binding energies and spatial extents of the trimer molecules produced are comparable, in their magnitudes, to those of the associated diatomic Feshbach molecule. The three-body molecular state follows Efimov's scenario when the pairwise attraction of the atoms is strengthened by tuning the magnetic field strength.