In this work we demonstrate a dynamic process in which SO coupling can coherently produce s-wave Feshbach molecules from a fully polarized Fermi gas, and can induce a coherent oscillation between Feshbach molecules and spin polarized gas. For comparison, we also show that such phenomena are absent if the inter-component coupling is momentum-independent. This demonstrates experimentally that SO coupling does provide finite matrix element between a singlet state and a triplet state, and therefore, implies the bound pairs of a system with SO coupling have triplet p-wave component, which can become topological superfluid by further cooling these pairs to condensation and confining them to lower dimension.
We study the dissociation of Feshbach molecules in ultracold Fermi gases with spin-orbit (SO) coupling. Since SO coupling can induce quantum transition between the Feshbach molecules and the fully polarized Fermi gas, the Feshbach molecules can be dissociated by the SO coupling. We experimentally realized this new type of dissociation in ultracold gases of 40K atoms with SO coupling created by Raman beams, and observed that the dissociation rate is highly non-monotonic on both the positive and negative Raman-detuning sides. Our results show that the dissociation of Feshbach molecules can be co…
The line shape of radio frequency spectra of tightly bound Feshbach molecules in strong transverse confinement can be described by a simple analytic formula that includes final state interactions. By direct comparison to experimental data, we clarify the role of effective range corrections to two-body bound-state energies in lower dimensions.
Using a two-channel model, we investigate theoretically the binding energy of confinement-induced Feshbach molecules in two- and one-dimensional ultracold atomic systems, near a Feshbach resonance. We show that the two-channel prediction will evidently deviate from the simple single-channel theory as the width of Feshbach resonances decreases. For one-dimensional system, we perform a full two-channel calculation, with the inclusion of bare interatomic interactions in the open channel. Away from the resonance, we find a sizable correction to the binding energy, if we neglect incorrectly the bar…
We study the impurity problem in a gas of $^{173}$Yb atoms near the recently discovered orbital Feshbach resonance. In an orbital Feshbach resonance, atoms in the electronic ground state $^1S_0$ interact with those in the long-lived excited $^3P_0$ state with magnetically tunable interactions. We consider an impurity atom with a given hyperfine spin in the $^3P_0$ state interacting with a single-component Fermi sea of atoms in the ground $^1S_0$ manifold. Close to the orbital Feshbach resonance, the impurity can induce collective particle-hole excitations out of the Fermi sea, which can be reg…
We derive general conditions for the emergence of singlet Feshbach molecules in the presence of artificial Zeeman fields for arbritary mixtures of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit orbit coupling in two or three dimensions. We focus on the formation of two-particle bound states resulting from interactions between ultra-cold spin-1/2 fermions, under the assumption that interactions are short-ranged and occur only in the s-wave channel. In this case, we calculate explicitly binding energies of Feshbach molecules and analyze their dependence on spin-orbit couplings, Zeeman fields, interactions an…
We study the mean-field dynamics of p-wave Feshbach molecule production in an ultra cold gas of Fermi atoms in the same internal state. We derive a separable potential to describe the low-energy scattering properties of such atoms, and use this potential to solve the mean-field dynamics during a magnetic field sweep. Initially, on the negative scattering length side of a Feshbach resonance the gas is described by the BCS theory. We adapt the method by Szymańska et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 170402 (2005)] to p-wave interacting Fermi gases and model the conversion dynamics of the gas into a Bose…
We report the creation of ultracold bosonic $^{23}$Na$^{87}$Rb Feshbach molecules via magneto-association. By ramping the magnetic field across an interspecies Feshbach resonance, at least 4000 molecules can be produced out of the near degenerate ultracold mixture. Fast loss due to inelastic atom-molecule collisions is observed, which limits the pure molecule number, after residual atoms removal, to 1700. The pure molecule sample can live for 21.8(8) ms in the optical trap, long enough for future molecular spectroscopy studies toward coherently transferring to the singlet ro-vibrational ground…
We reveal the existence of high-density Feshbach resonances in the collision between the ground and metastable states of $^{171}$Yb and coherently produce the associated Feshbach molecules by photoassociation. The extremely small transition rate is overcome by the enhanced Franck-Condon factor of the weakly bound Feshbach molecule, allowing us to observe Rabi oscillations with long decay time between an atom pair and a molecule in an optical lattice. We also perform the precision measurement of the binding energies, which characterizes the observed resonances. The ultra-narrow photoassociation…
We have realized long-lived ground-state polar molecules in a 3D optical lattice, with a lifetime of up to 25 s, which is limited only by off-resonant scattering of the trapping light. Starting from a 2D optical lattice, we observe that the lifetime increases dramatically as a small lattice potential is added along the tube-shaped lattice traps. The 3D optical lattice also dramatically increases the lifetime for weakly bound Feshbach molecules. For a pure gas of Feshbach molecules, we observe a lifetime of >20 s in a 3D optical lattice; this represents a 100-fold improvement over previous resu…
We describe the formation of fermionic NaLi Feshbach molecules from an ultracold mixture of bosonic 23Na and fermionic 6Li. Precise magnetic field sweeps across a narrow Feshbach resonance at 745 G result in a molecule conversion fraction of 5% for our experimental densities and temperatures, corresponding to a molecule number of 5*10^4. The observed molecular decay ifetime is 1.3 ms after removing free Li and Na atoms from the trap.
We analyze the temporal behavior of the survival probability of an unstable $^6$Li Feshbach molecule close to the BCS-BEC crossover. We find different instances of nonexponential decay as the magnetic field approaches the resonance value, at which the molecule becomes stable. We observe a transition from an exponential decay towards a regime dominated by a stretched-exponential law.
We demonstrate the transfer of $^{23}$Na$^{40}$K molecules from a closed-channel dominated Feshbach-molecule state to the absolute ground state. The Feshbach molecules are initially created from a gas of sodium and potassium atoms via adiabatic ramping over a Feshbach resonance at 78.3$\,$G. The molecules are then transferred to the absolute ground state using stimulated Raman adiabatic passage with an intermediate state in the spin-orbit-coupled complex $|c^3 Σ^+, v=35, J=1 \rangle \sim |B^1Π, v=12, J=1\rangle$. Our measurements show that the pump transition dipole moment linearly increases w…
We report on the formation of ultracold fermionic Feshbach molecules of $^{23}$Na$^{40}$K, the first fermionic molecule that is chemically stable in its ground state. The lifetime of the nearly degenerate molecular gas exceeds 100 ms in the vicinity of the Feshbach resonance. The measured dependence of the molecular binding energy on the magnetic field demonstrates the open-channel character of the molecules over a wide field range and implies significant singlet admixture. This will enable efficient transfer into the singlet vibrational ground state, resulting in a stable molecular Fermi gas …
We extend our previous investigations of fermionic condensation in broad Feshbach resonances by using the two-channel model developed for narrow Feshbach resonances. We investigate two crossovers: the BCS-BEC crossover by changing the s-wave scattering length and the crossover from a narrow to a broad resonance by changing the atom-molecule coupling. At zero temperature we analyze, as a function of both atom-molecule coupling and s-wave scattering length, the chemical potential, the energy gap, and the condensate fraction of atoms. In particular, we predict the contribution of Cooper pairs and…
We have created a quantum degenerate Bose-Fermi mixture of 23Na and 40K with widely tunable interactions via broad interspecies Feshbach resonances. Twenty Feshbach resonances between 23Na and 40K were identified. The large and negative triplet background scattering length between 23Na and 40K causes a sharp enhancement of the fermion density in the presence of a Bose condensate. As explained via the asymptotic bound-state model (ABM), this strong background scattering leads to a series of wide Feshbach resonances observed at low magnetic fields. Our work opens up the prospect to create chemic…
We selectively create p-wave Feshbach molecules in the $m_{l}=\pm 1$ orbital angular momentum projection state of $^{6}$Li. We use an optical lattice potential to restrict the relative momentum of the atoms such that only the $m_{l}=\pm 1$ molecular state couples to the atoms at the Feshbach resonance. We observe the hollow-centered dissociation profile, which is a clear indication of the selective creation of p-wave molecules in the $m_{l}=\pm1$ states. We also measure the dissociation energy of the p-wave molecules created in the optical lattice and develop a theoretical formulation to expla…
We present investigations of the formation rate and collisional stability of lithium Feshbach molecules in an ultracold three-component mixture composed of two resonantly interacting fermionic 6-Li spin states and bosonic 174-Yb. We observe long molecule lifetimes (> 100 ms) even in the presence of a large ytterbium bath and extract reaction rate coefficients of the system. We find good collisional stability of the mixture in the unitary regime, opening new possibilities for studies and probes of strongly interacting quantum gases in contact with a bath species.
We report the observation of a dimer-dimer inelastic collision resonance for ultracold Feshbach molecules made of bosonic sodium and rubidium atoms. This resonance, which we attribute to the crossing of the dimer-dimer threshold with a heteronuclear tetramer state, manifests itself as a pronounced inelastic loss peak of dimers when the interspecies scattering length between the constituent atoms is tuned. Near this resonance, a strong modification of the temperature dependence of the dimer-dimer scattering is observed. Our result provides insight into the heteronuclear four-body system consist…
We report on the creation of ultracold gases of bosonic Feshbach molecules of NaCs. The molecules are associated from overlapping gases of Na and Cs using a Feshbach resonance at 864.12(5) G. We characterize the Feshbach resonance using bound state spectroscopy, in conjunction with a coupled-channel calculation. By varying the temperature and atom numbers of the initial atomic mixtures, we demonstrate the association of NaCs gases over a wide dynamic range of molecule numbers and temperatures, reaching 70 nK for our coldest systems and a phase-space density near 0.1. This is an important stepp…
Dynamics of atomic and molecular bright solitons in a hybrid atom-molecular BEC (Bose Einstein Condensate) system of 85Rb coupled through Magnetic Feshbach Resonance (MFR) has been investigated. By solving the time independent atom-molecular coupled equations, the initial atomic and molecular wavefunctions were obtained and the dynamics of the initial atomic and molecular waves in a spherical one-dimensional trap were studied by solving the time-dependent atom-molecular coupled equations. During evolution two types of induced or stimulated decays of the feshbach molecules were switched on. The…
We investigate magnetoassociation of ultracold fermionic Feshbach molecules in a mixture of $^{40}$K and $^{87}$Rb atoms, where we can create as many as $7\times 10^4$ $^{40}$K$^{87}$Rb molecules with a conversion efficiency as high as 45%. In the perturbative regime, we find that the conversion efficiency depends linearly on the density overlap of the two gases, with a slope that matches a parameter-free model that uses only the atom masses and the known Feshbach resonance parameters. In the saturated regime, we find that the maximum number of Feshbach molecules depends on the atoms' phase-sp…
We show that radiofrequency (RF) radiation may be used to create Feshbach resonances in ultracold gases of alkali-metal atoms at desired magnetic fields that are convenient for atomic cooling and degeneracy. For the case of $^{39}$K+$^{133}$Cs, where there are no RF-free resonances in regions where Cs may be cooled to degeneracy, we show that a resonance may be created near 21~G with 69.2~MHz RF radiation. This resonance is almost lossless with circularly polarized RF, and the molecules created are long-lived even with plane-polarized RF.
The strong-coupling limit of molecule formation in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate via two-mode one-color photoassociation or sweep across a Feshbach resonance is examined using a basic nonlinear time-dependent two-state model. For the general class of term-crossing models with constant coupling, a common strategy for attacking the problem is developed based on the reduction of the initial system of semiclassical equations for atom-molecule amplitudes to a third order nonlinear differential equation for the molecular state probability. This equation provides deriving exact solution for a cl…
We study collisions in an optically trapped, pure sample of ultracold Cs$_2$ molecules in various internal states. The molecular gas is created by Feshbach association from a near-degenerate atomic gas, with adjustable temperatures in the nanokelvin range. We identify several narrow loss resonances, which point to the coupling to more complex molecular states and may be interpreted as Feshbach resonances in dimer-dimer interactions. Moreover, in some molecular states we observe a surprising temperature dependence in collisional loss. This shows that the situation cannot be understood in terms …
Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of Feshbach molecules in a homogeneous Bose gas is studied at finite temperatures in a single-channel mean-field approach where the Hartree-Fock energy and pairing gap are determined self-consistently. In the molecular-BEC state, the atomic excitation is gapped and the molecular excitation is gapless. The binding energy of Feshbach molecules is shifted from the vacuum value due to many-body effect. When the scattering length $a_s$ of atoms is negative, the system is subject to mechanical collapse due to negative compressibility. The system is stable in most reg…
The conversion of ultracold atoms to molecules via a magnetic Feshbach resonance with a sinusoidal modulation of the field is studied. Different practical realizations of this method in Bose atomic gases are analyzed. Our model incorporates many-body effects through an effective reduction of the complete microscopic dynamics. Moreover, we simulate the experimental conditions corresponding to the preparation of the system as a thermal gas and as a condensate. Some of the experimental findings are clarified. The origin of the observed dependence of the production efficiency on the frequency, amp…
In this paper we explore the spin-orbit-induced bound state and molecular signature of the degenerate Fermi gas in a narrow Feshbach resonance based on a generalized two-channel model. Without the atom-atom interactions, only one bound state can be found even if spin-orbit coupling exists. Moreover, the corresponding bound-state energy depends strongly on the strength of spin-orbit coupling, but is influenced slightly by its type. In addition, we find that when increasing the strength of spin-orbit coupling, the critical point at which the molecular fraction vanishes shifts from zero to the ne…
We have performed radio-frequency dissociation spectroscopy of weakly bound ^6Li_2 Feshbach molecules using low-density samples of about 30 molecules in an optical dipole trap. Combined with a high magnetic field stability this allows us to resolve the discrete trap levels in the RF dissociation spectra. This novel technique allows the binding energy of Feshbach molecules to be determined with unprecedented precision. We use these measurements as an input for a fit to the ^6Li scattering potential using coupled-channel calculations. From this new potential, we determine the pole positions of t…
In a recent paper (Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 015301 (2009), arXiv:0810.3763) Rousseau and Denteneer claim that an unconventional "super-Mott" (SM) phase is realized by bosons trapped in an optical lattice close to a Feshbach resonance with a molecular state. The supposed SM phase, observed via quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations of an atom-molecule Bose-Hubbard model, is an incompressible phase developing spontaneous atomic/molecular supercurrents which are perfectly anticorrelated. Here we show that the identification of this phase is based on a misinterpretation of the estimators of superfluid…
We present a detailed study of interspecies Feshbach resonances of the bosonic $^{23}\mathrm{Na}+$$^{39}\mathrm{K}$ mixture for magnetic fields up to $750 \, \mathrm{G}$ in various collision channels. A total of fourteen Feshbach resonances are reported, as well as four zero crossings of the scattering length and three inelastic two-body loss features. We use the observed magnetic field locations of the resonant features together with the known data on $^{23}\mathrm{Na}+$$^{40}\mathrm{K}$ to refine the singlet and triplet ground state potentials of NaK and achieve a consistent description of F…
We investigate phase separation of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of two-component atoms and one-component molecules with a homonuclear Feshbach resonance. We develop a full model for dilute atomic and molecular gases including correlation of the Feshbach resonance and all kinds of interparticle interactions, and numerically calculate order parameters of the BECs in spherical harmonic oscillator traps at zero temperature with the Bogoliubov's classical field approximation. As a result, we find out that the Feshbach resonance can induce two types of phase separation. The actual phase structur…
The properties of impurities immersed in a large Fermi sea are naturally described in terms of dressed quasiparticles: attractive and repulsive polarons, and dressed molecules. Motivated by recent experiments on narrow Feshbach resonances, we analyze here how the quasiparticle properties are affected by a non-zero resonance range. We find two interesting analytic results. For large range, the ground state energy close to resonance is shown to become perturbative in the inverse range. In the limit of broad resonance instead, we provide a new Tan's relation linking the impurity ground state ener…
We theoretically investigate the momentum-resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy of a harmonically trapped atomic Fermi gas near a Feshbach resonance in the presence of equal Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling. The system is qualitatively modeled as an ideal gas mixture of atoms and molecules, in which the properties of molecules, such as the wavefunction, binding energy and effective mass, are determined from the two-particle solution of two-interacting atoms. We calculate separately the radio-frequency response from atoms and molecules at finite temperatures by using the standard Ferm…
Collisional resonances are an important tool which has been used to modify interactions in ultracold gases, for realizing novel Hamiltonians in quantum simulations, for creating molecules from atomic gases and for controlling chemical reactions. So far, such resonances have been observed for atom-atom collisions, atom-molecule collisions and collisions between Feshbach molecules which are very weakly bound. Whether such resonances exist for ultracold ground state molecules has been debated due to the possibly high density of states and/or rapid decay of the resonant complex. Here we report a v…
We have studied interspecies scattering in an ultracold mixture of $^{87}$Rb and $^{133}$Cs atoms, both in their lowest-energy spin states. The three-body loss signatures of 30 incoming s- and p-wave magnetic Feshbach resonances over the range 0 to 667 G have been catalogued. Magnetic field modulation spectroscopy was used to observe molecular states bound by up to 2.5 MHz$\times h$. Magnetic moment spectroscopy along the magneto-association pathway from 197 to 182 G gives results consistent with the observed and calculated dependence of the binding energy on magnetic field strength. We have c…
Magnetic Feshbach resonances are an invaluable tool for controlling ultracold atoms and molecules. They can be used to tune atomic interactions and have been used extensively to explore few- and many-body phenomena. They can also be used for magnetoassociation, in which pairs of atoms are converted into molecules by ramping an applied magnetic field across a resonance. Pairs of open-shell atoms, such as the alkalis, chromium, and some lanthanides, exhibit broad resonances because the corresponding molecule has multiple electronic states. However, molecules formed between alkali and closed-shel…
We present a theoretical model for Bragg scattering from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the vicinity of a magnetic Feshbach resonance, using a two c-field formalism, one c-field for the atom and the other for a molecule formed of two atoms. We use this model to numerically simulate a recent experiment [S. B. Papp et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 101(13):135301, Sep 2008] investigating the effects of strong interactions on the Bragg spectrum from a 85Rb BEC. Results from these simulations are in very good quantitative agreement with the experimental results, confirming the importance of the reson…
We compute the fraction of closed-channel molecules in trapped atomic Fermi gases, over the entire range of accessible fields and temperatures. We use a two-channel model of BCS--Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover theory at general temperature $T$, and show that this fraction provides a measure of the $T$ dependent pairing gap. Our calculations, containing no free parameters, are in good quantitative agreement with recent low $T$ measurements in $^6$Li. We present readily testable predictions for the dependencies of the closed-channel fraction on temperature and Fermi momentum.
We present the prospects for photoassociation, optical control of interspecies scattering lengths and finally, the production of ultracold absolute ground state molecules in the Rb+Hg system. We use the "gold standard" ab initio methods for the calculations of ground (CCSD(T)) and excited state (EOM-CCSD) potential curves. The RbHg system, thanks to the wide range of stable Hg bosonic isotopes, offers possibilities for mass-tuning of ground state interactions. The optical lengths describing the strengths of optical Feshbach resonances near the Rb transitions are favorable even at large laser d…
We study enhanced magneto-association of atoms into weakly-bound molecules near a Feshbach resonance using a quench preparatory stage. In anticipation of experiments with NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the International Space Station, we assume as a baseline a dual-species ($^{87}$Rb and $^{41}$K) gas in a parameter regime enabled by a microgravity environment. This includes subnanokelvin temperatures and dual-species gases at densities as low as 10$^8$/cm$^3$. Our studies indicate that, in such a regime, traditional magneto-association schemes are inefficient due to the weak coupling betw…
In the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance, a system of ultracold atoms on an optical lattice undergoes rich physical transformations which involve molecule formation and hopping of molecules on the lattice and thus goes beyond a single-band Hubbard model description. We propose to probe the behavior of this system with a harmonic modulation of the magnetic field, and thus of the scattering length, across the Feshbach resonance, as an alternative to lattice-depth modulation spectroscopy. In the regime in which the single-band Hubbard model is still valid, we provide simulation data for this type …
We model the formation of stable heteronuclear molecules via pulsed Raman photoassociation of a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate near a strong Feshbach resonance, for both counterintuitive and intuitive pulse sequencing. Compared to lasers alone, weak Raman photoassociation is enhanced by as much as a factor of ten (five) for a counterintuitive (intuitive) pulse sequence, whereas strong Raman photoassociation is barely enhanced at all--regardless of pulse sequence. Stronger intra-atom, molecule, or atom-molecule collisions lead to an expected decrease in conversion efficiency, but strong…
We observe thermalization in the production of a degenerate Fermi gas of polar ${}^{40}\text{K}{}^{87}\text{Rb}$ molecules. By measuring the atom--dimer elastic scattering cross section near the Feshbach resonance, we show that Feshbach molecules rapidly reach thermal equilibrium with both parent atomic species. Equilibrium is essentially maintained through coherent transfer to the ground state. Sub-Poissonian density fluctuations in Feshbach and ground-state molecules are measured, giving an independent characterization of degeneracy and directly probing the molecular Fermi--Dirac distributio…
A coupled atom-molecule condensate with an intraspecies Feshbach resonance is employed to explore matter wave bistability both in the presence and in the absence of a unidirectional optical ring cavity. In particular, a set of conditions are derived that allow the threshold for bistability, due both to two-body s-wave scatterings and to cavity-mediated two-body interactions, to be determined analytically. The latter bistability is found to support, not only transitions between a mixed (atom-molecule) state and a pure molecular state as in the former bistability, but also transitions between tw…
Feshbach resonances in ultra-cold atomic gases have led to some of the most important advances in atomic physics. They did not only enable ground breaking work in the BEC-BCS crossover regime [1], but are also widely used for the association of ultra-cold molecules [2], leading to the formation of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates [3,4] and ultra-cold dipolar molecular systems [5]. Here, we demonstrate the experimental realization of an optical Feshbach resonance using ultra-long range Rydberg molecules [6]. We show their practical use by tuning the revival time of a quantum many-body system…
We explore possible pathways for the creation of ultracold polar NaK molecules in their absolute electronic and rovibrational ground state starting from ultracold Feshbach molecules. In particular, we present a multi-channel analysis of the electronic ground and K(4p)+Na(3s) excited state manifold of NaK, analyze the spin character of both the Feshbach molecular state and the electronically excited intermediate states and discuss possible coherent two-photon transfer paths from Feshbach molecules to rovibronic ground state molecules. The theoretical study is complemented by the demonstration o…
