Weakly bound dimers of fermionic atoms

D. Petrov (1, 2) , Christophe Salomon (3) , Gora V. Shlyapnikov (1, 2, 3)

1 AMOLF - FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics
2 NRC KI - National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute"
3 LKB (Lhomond) - Laboratoire Kastler Brossel

We discuss the behavior of weakly bound bosonic dimers formed in a cold Fermi gas at a large positive scattering length $a$ for the interspecies interaction. We find the exact solution for the dimer-dimer elastic scattering and obtain a strong decrease of their collisional relaxation and decay with increasing $a$. The large ratio of the elastic to inelastic rate is promising for achieving Bose-Einstein condensation of the dimers and cooling the condensed gas to very low temperatures.

Domaines: Mécanique statistique [cond-mat.stat-mech]

D. Petrov, Christophe Salomon, Gora V. Shlyapnikov. Weakly bound dimers of fermionic atoms. Physical Review Letters, 2004, 93, pp.090404. ⟨hal-00002933⟩