Journal
NATURE PHYSICS
Volume 5, Issue 3, Pages 227-230Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS1203
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
- European Commission
- Lise Meitner program of the FWF
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The field of few-body physics has originally been motivated by understanding nuclear matter, but in the past few years ultracold gases with tunable interactions have emerged as model systems to experimentally explore few-body quantum systems(1-3). Even though the energy scales involved are vastly different for ultracold and nuclear matter (picoelectronvolt as compared with megaelectronvolt), few-body phenomena acquire universal properties for near-resonant two-body interactions(2). So-called Efimov states represent a paradigm for universal quantum states in the three-body sector(4). After decades of theoretical work, a first experimental signature of such a weakly bound trimer state was recently found under conditions where a weakly bound dimer state is absent(5-7). Here, we report on a trimer state in the opposite regime, where such a dimer state exists. The trimer state manifests itself in a resonant enhancement of inelastic collisions in a mixture of atoms and dimers. Our observation is closely related to an atom-dimer resonance as predicted by Efimov(8-10), but occurs in the theoretically challenging regime where the trimer spectrum reveals effects beyond the universal limit.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available