Suppression of Unitary Three-Body Loss in a Degenerate Bose-Fermi Mixture

Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 153401 – Published 14 April 2022

 

Ultracold mixtures of bosonic and fermionic atoms provide a powerful platform for studying quantum many-body phenomena. However, the experimental investigation of such mixtures in the strongly interacting regime has been hindered by the three-body recombination loss. Here, we find that the three-body loss in the unitary regime is suppressed with the increasing degeneracy of the Fermi gas. While the suppression of loss is qualitatively explained within the few-body scattering framework, a remaining suppression provides evidence for the long-range Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interactions mediated by fermions between bosons. Our model based on RKKY interactions quantitatively reproduces the data without free parameters, and predicts one order of magnitude reduction of the three-body loss coefficient in the deeply Fermi-degenerate regime.

To learn more about our recent publication please see Physical Review Letters 128.