Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 4, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Suppression of molecular decay in ultracold gases without Fermi statistics
1JILA, University of Colorado and NIST, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0440, USA.
Abstract:
We study inelastic processes for ultracold three-body systems in which only one interaction is resonant. We show that at ultracold temperatures three-body recombination in such systems leads mainly to the formation of weakly bound molecules. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, we have found that the decay rates for weakly bound molecules due to collisions with other atoms can be suppressed not only without fermionic statistics but also when bosonic statistics applies. These results indicate that recombination in three-component atomic gases can be used as an efficient mechanism for molecular formation, allowing the achievement of high molecular densities.
Related Concept Videos
Fermi Level Dynamics
Electron affinity in semiconductors refers to the energy gap between the minimum of its conduction band and the vacuum level and it is a critical parameter in determining how easily a semiconductor can accept additional electrons.
The work...
Atomic Nuclei: Nuclear Spin State Population Distribution
¹³C NMR: ¹H–¹³C Decoupling
A broadband decoupling technique is used to simplify these complex, sometimes overlapping, signals. Broadband decoupling relies on a...
Atomic Nuclei: Nuclear Relaxation Processes
Atomic Nuclei: Types of Nuclear Relaxation
In spin–lattice or longitudinal relaxation, the excited spins exchange energy with the surrounding lattice as they return to the lower energy level. Among several mechanisms that contribute to spin–lattice relaxation, magnetic dipolar interactions are significant. Here, the excited nucleus transfers energy to a nearby...
Atomic Spectroscopy: Effects of Temperature
At thermal equilibrium, the relative populations of excited and ground state atoms can be estimated using the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. For example, an increase in temperature from...

