Atom-Dimer Scattering and Long-Lived Trimers in Fermionic Mixtures

We consider a heteronuclear fermionic mixture on the molecular side of an interspecies Feshbach resonance and discuss atom-dimer scattering properties in uniform space and in the presence of an external confining potential, restricting the system to a quasi-two-dimensional geometry. We find that there is a peculiar atom-dimer p-wave resonance which can be tuned by changing the frequency of the confinement. Our results have implications for the ongoing experiments on lithium-potassium mixtures, where this mechanism allows for switching the p-wave interaction between a K atom and Li-K dimer from attractive to repulsive, and forming a weakly bound trimer with unit angular momentum. We show that such trimers are long lived and the atom-dimer resonance does not enhance inelastic relaxation in the mixture, making it an outstanding candidate for studies of p-wave resonance effects in a many-body system.