2006/09/19 by Sergey Grishkevich, Alejandro Saenz, Alejandro Sáenz
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.76.022704
19 pages, 17 figures
arxiv created 2006/09/19 · openalex publication_date 2007/08/07 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The influence of a tight isotropic harmonic trap on photoassociation of two ultracold alkali-metal atoms forming a homonuclear diatomic is investigated using realistic atomic interaction potentials. Confinement of the initial atom pair due to the trap leads to a uniform strong enhancement of the photoassociation rate to most, but also to a strongly suppressed rate for some final states. Thus tighter traps do not necessarily enhance the photoassociation rate. A further massive enhancement of the rate is found for strong interatomic interaction potentials. The details of this interaction play a minor role, except for large repulsive interactions for which a sharp window occurs in the photoassociation spectrum as is known from the trap-free case. A comparison with simplified models describing the atomic interaction like the pseudopotential approximation shows that they often provide reasonable estimates for the trap-induced enhancement of the photoassociation rate even if the predicted rates can be completely erroneous.