Collisional stability of fermionic Feshbach molecules

Understand

Using a Feshbach resonance, we create ultracold fermionic molecules starting from a Bose-Fermi atom gas mixture.

• The resulting mixture of atoms and weakly bound molecules provides a rich system for studying few-body collisions because of the variety of atomic collision partners for molecules; either bosonic, fermionic, or distinguishable atoms.
• Inelastic loss of the molecules near the Feshbach resonance is dramatically affected by the quantum statistics of the colliding particles and the scattering length.
• In particular, we observe a molecule lifetime as long as 100 ms near the Feshbach resonance.