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Published on: August 6, 2018
Probing Photoinduced Two-Body Loss of Ultracold Nonreactive Bosonic ^{23}Na^{87}Rb and ^{23}Na^{39}K Molecules
Philipp Gersema1, Kai K Voges1, Mara Meyer Zum Alten Borgloh1
1Institut für Quantenoptik, Leibniz Universität Hannover, 30167 Hannover, Germany.
Abstract:
We probe photoinduced 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 significantly suppressed due to the small expected complex lifetimes of about 13 and 6 μs for ^{23}Na^{87}Rb and ^{23}Na^{39}K, respectively. However, instead we do not observe any suppression of the two-body loss in parameter ranges where large loss suppressions are expected. We believe these unexpected results are most probably due to drastic underestimation of the complex lifetime by at least 1-2 orders of magnitude.
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