Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 213201 (2005) [4 pages]

Scattering Length Scaling Laws for Ultracold Three-Body Collisions

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J. P. D’Incao and B. D. Esry
Department of Physics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas 66506, USA

Received 22 November 2004; published 2 June 2005

We present a simple and unifying picture that provides the energy and scattering length dependence for all inelastic three-body collision rates in the ultracold regime for three-body systems with short-range two-body interactions. Here, we present the scaling laws for vibrational relaxation, three-body recombination, and collision-induced dissociation for systems that support s-wave two-body collisions. These systems include three identical bosons, two identical bosons, and two identical fermions. Our approach reproduces all previous results, predicts several others, and gives the general form of the scaling laws in all cases.


©2005 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.213201
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.213201
PACS: 34.10.+x, 05.30.Jp, 32.80.Cy

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