The elastic scattering properties of three bosons at low energy enter the many-body description of ultracold Bose gases via the three-body scattering hypervolume $D$. We study this quantity for identical bosons that interact via a pairwise finite-range potential. Our calculations cover the regime from strongly repulsive potentials towards attractive potentials supporting multiple two-body bound states and are consistent with the few existing predictions for $D$. We present the first numerical confirmation of the universal predictions for $D$ in the strongly interacting regime, where Efimov physics dominates, for a local nonzero-range potential. Our findings highlight how $D$ is influenced by three-body quasibound states with strong $d$-wave or $g$-wave characteristics in the weakly interacting regime.
The low-energy scattering of three bosons or distinguishable particles with short-range interactions is characterized by a fundamental parameter, the three-body scattering hypervolume. Its imaginary part is directly related to the three-body recombination rate in a quantum gas consisting of such particles. We derive an analytical formula of it for weak interactions, and perform its first numerical calculations for bosons with a variable nonzero-range potential. For attractive interactions, we identify several three-body resonances at which the three-body scattering hypervolume becomes divergen…
We investigate the occurence of Wigner-localization phenomena in bosonic dipolar ultracold few-body systems with Rashba-like spin-orbit coupling. We show that the latter strongly enhances the effects of the dipole-dipole interactions, allowing to reach the Wigner-localized regime for strengths of the dipole moment much smaller than those necessary in the spin-orbit-free case.
I study the zero-temperature phase behavior of bosonic particles living on the nodes of a regular spherical mesh ("Platonic mesh") and interacting through an extended Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. Only the hard-core version of the model is considered here, for two instances of Platonic mesh. Using the mean-field decoupling approximation, I show that the system may exist in various ground states, which can be regarded as analogs of gas, solid, supersolid, and superfluid. For one mesh, by comparing the theoretical results with the outcome of numerical diagonalization, I manage to uncover the signatu…
We analyze the collision of three particles with arbitrary mass ratio at zero collision energy, assuming arbitrary short-range potentials, and generalize the three-body scattering hypervolume $D$ first defined for identical bosons in 2008. We solve the three-body Schrödinger equation asymptotically when the three particles are far apart or one pair and a third particle are far apart, deriving two asymptotic expansions of the wave function, and the parameter $D$ appears at the order $1/B^4$, where $B$ is the overall size of the triangle formed by the particles. We then analyze the ground state …
We study the influence of quantum density fluctuations in ultracold atoms in an optical lattice on the scattering of matter waves. Such fluctuations are characteristic of the superfluid phase and vanish due to increased interactions in the Mott insulating phase. We employ an analytical treatment of the scattering and demonstrate that the fluctuations lead to incoherent processes, which we propose to observe via decoherence of the fringes in a Mach-Zender interferometer. In this way we extract the purely coherent part of the scattering. Further, we show that the quantum density fluctuations can…
The dipolar collision between ultracold polar molecules is an important topic both by its own right from the fundamental point of view and for the successful exploration of many-body physics with strong and long-range dipolar interactions. Here, we report the investigation of collisions between ultracold ground-state sodium-rubidium molecules in electric fields with induced electric dipole moments as large as 0.7$\;$D. We observe a step-wise enhancement of losses due to the coupling between different partial waves induced by the increasingly stronger anisotropic dipolar interactions. Varying t…
We probe photo-induced loss for chemically stable bosonic $^{23}$Na$^{87}$Rb and $^{23}$Na$^{39}$K molecules in chopped optical dipole traps where the molecules spend a significant time in the dark. We expect the effective two-body decay to be largely suppressed in chopped traps due to the small expected complex lifetimes of about $13μ$s and $6μ$s for $^{23}$Na$^{87}$Rb and $^{23}$Na$^{39}$K respectively. However, instead we do observe near-universal loss even at the lowest chopping frequencies we can probe. Our data thus either suggest a so far unknown loss mechanism or a drastic underestimat…
Interactions in an ultracold boson-fermion mixture are often manifested by elastic collisions. In a mixture of a condensed Bose gas (BEC) and spin polarized degenerate Fermi gas (DFG), fermions can mediate spin-spin interactions between bosons, leading to an effective long-range magnetic interaction analogous to Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction in solids. We used Ramsey spectroscopy of the hyperfine clock transition in a $^{87}$Rb BEC to measure the interaction mediated by a $^{40}$K DFG. By controlling the bosons density we isolated the effect of mediated interactions from mea…
We study zero-energy collisions between three identical bosons with spin $f = 1$ interacting via pairwise potentials. We quantify the corresponding three-body scattering hypervolumes, which parametrize the effective three-body interaction strengths in a many-body description of spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates. Our results demonstrate universal behavior of the scattering hypervolumes for strong $s$- and $p$-wave two-body interactions. At weak interactions we find that the real parts of the scattering hypervolumes are predominantly determined by hard-hyperspherelike collisions which we characte…
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…
Ultracold interacting atoms are an excellent tool to study correlation functions of many-body systems that are generally eluding detection and manipulation. Herein, we investigate the ground state of bosons in a tilted triple-well potential and characterize the many-body state by the eigenvalues of its reduced one-body density matrix and Glauber correlation functions. We unveil how the interplay between the interaction strength and the tilt can be used to control the number of correlated wells as well as the fragmentation, i.e. the number of macroscopic eigenvalues of the reduced one-body dens…
In a combined experimental and theoretical effort, we demonstrate a novel type of dipolar system made of ultracold bosonic dipolar molecules with large magnetic dipole moments. Our dipolar molecules are formed in weakly bound Feshbach molecular states from a sample of strongly magnetic bosonic erbium atoms. We show that the ultracold magnetic molecules can carry very large dipole moments and we demonstrate how to create and characterize them, and how to change their orientation. Finally, we confirm that the relaxation rates of molecules in a quasi-two dimensional geometry can be reduced by usi…
The out-of-equilibrium dynamics of finite ultracold bosonic ensembles in periodically driven one-dimensional optical lattices is investigated. Our study reveals that the driving enforces the bosons in different wells to oscillate in-phase and to exhibit a dipole-like mode. A wide range from weak-to-strong driving frequencies is covered and a resonance-like behaviour of the intra-well dynamics is discussed. In the proximity of the resonance a rich intraband excitation spectrum is observed. The single particle excitation mechanisms are studied in the framework of Floquet theory elucidating the r…
We study the manifestations of universal four-body physics in ultracold dimer-dimer collisions. We show that resonant features associated with three-body Efimov physics and dimer-dimer scattering lengths are universally related. The emergence of universal four-boson states allows for the tunability of the dimer-dimer interaction, thus enabling the future study of ultracold molecular gases with both attractive and repulsive interactions. Moreover, our study of the interconversion between dimers and Efimov trimers shows that $B_{2}+B_{2}\to B_{3}+B$ rearrangement reactions can provide an efficie…
The out-of-equilibrium dynamics of interaction quenched finite ultracold bosonic ensembles in periodically driven one-dimensional optical lattices is investigated. It is shown that periodic driving enforces the bosons in the outer wells of the finite lattice to exhibit out-of-phase dipole-like modes, while in the central well the atomic cloud experiences a local breathing mode. The dynamical behavior is investigated with varying driving frequency, revealing a resonant-like behavior of the intra-well dynamics. An interaction quench in the periodically driven lattice gives rise to admixtures of …
The correlated non-equilibrium quantum dynamics following a multiple interaction quench protocol for few-bosonic ensembles confined in finite optical lattices is investigated. The quenches give rise to an interwell tunneling and excite the cradle and a breathing mode. Several tunneling pathways open during the time interval of increased interactions, while only a few occur when the system is quenched back to its original interaction strength. The cradle mode, however, persists during and in between the quenches, while the breathing mode possesses dinstinct frequencies. The occupation of excite…
The recombination rate for three identical bosons has been calculated to test the limits of its universal behavior. It has been obtained for several different collision energies and scattering lengths (a) up to 10^5 a.u., giving rates that vary over 15 orders of magnitude. We find that universal behavior is limited to the threshold region characterized by E lesssim hbar^2/(2mu_{12}a^2), where E is the total energy and mu_{12} is the two-body reduced mass. The analytically predicted infinite series of resonance peaks and interference minima is truncated to no more than three of each for typical…
Elastic scattering resonances occurring in ultracold collisions of either bosonic or fermionic polar molecules are investigated. The Born-Oppenheimer adiabatic representation of the two-bodydynamics provides both a qualitative classification scheme and a quantitative WKB quantization condition that predicts several sequences of resonant states. It is found that the near-threshold energy dependence of ultracold collision cross sections varies significantly with the particle exchange symmetry, with bosonic systems showing much smoother energy variations than their fermionic counterparts. Resonan…
We study ultracold three-body collisions of bosons and fermions when the interatomic interaction is tuned near a narrow Feshbach resonance. We show that the width of the resonance has a substantial impact on the collisional properties of ultracold gases in the strongly interacting regime. We obtain numerical and analytical results that allow us to identify universal features related to the resonance width. For narrow resonances, we have found a suppression of all inelastic processes in boson systems leading to deeply bound states and an enhancement for fermion systems.
We study quadrupole collective oscillations in the bose-fermi mixtures of ultracold atomic gases of Yb isotopes, which are realized by Kyoto group. Three kinds of combinations are chosen, Yb170-Yb171, Yb170-Yb173 and Yb174-Yb173, where boson-fermion interactions are weakly repulsive, strongly attractive and strongly repulsive respectively. Collective oscillations in these mixtures are calculated in a dynamical time-evolution approach formulated with the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii and the Vlasov equations. The boson oscillations are shown to have one collective mode, and the fermions are s…
We present a study of the superfluid properties of atomic Bose gases in optical lattice potentials using the Bose-Hubbard model. To do this, we use a microscopic definition of the superfluid fraction based on the response of the system to a phase variation imposed by means of twisted boundary conditions. We compare the superfluid fraction to other physical quantities, i.e., the interference pattern after ballistic expansion, the quasi-momentum distribution, and number fluctuations. We have performed exact numerical calculations of all these quantities for small one-dimensional systems. We show…
We measure nonlocal third-order spatial correlations in non-degenerate ultracold gases of bosonic ($^{84}$Sr) and spin-polarized fermionic ($^{87}$Sr) strontium through studies of the formation rates for ultralong-range trimer Rydberg molecules. The trimer production rate is observed to be very sensitive to the effects of quantum statistics with a strong enhancement of up to a factor of six (3!) in the case of bosonic $^{84}$Sr due to bunching, and a marked reduction for spin-polarized fermionic $^{87}$Sr due to anti-bunching. The experimental results are compared to theoretical predictions an…
