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Quantifying Light-Assisted Collisions in Optical Tweezers across the Hyperfine Spectrum
Steven K Pampel1, Matteo Marinelli1, Mark O Brown1
1University of Colorado, JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado, and Department of Physics, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.
Abstract:
We investigate the role of hyperfine structure in resonant-dipole interactions between two atoms cotrapped in an optical tweezer. Two-body loss rates from light-assisted collisions (LACs) are measured across the ^{87}Rb hyperfine spectrum and connected to properties of molecular photoassociation potentials via a semiclassical model. To obtain our results, we introduce an imaging technique that leverages repulsive LACs to detect two atoms in a trap, thereby circumventing parity constraints in tweezers. Our findings offer key insights for exploiting hyperfine structure in laser-induced collisions to control cold atoms and molecules in a broad range of quantum science applications.
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