Collisional properties of weakly bound heteronuclear dimers

Understand

We consider collisional properties of weakly bound heteronuclear molecules (dimers) formed in a two-species mixture of atoms with a large mass difference.

• We focus on dimers containing light fermionic atoms as they manifest collisional stability due to an effective dimer-dimer repulsion originating from the exchange of the light atoms.
• In order to solve the dimer-dimer scattering problem we develop a theoretical approach, which provides a physically transparent and quantitative description of this four-atom system in terms of three- and two-body observables.
• We calculate the elastic scattering amplitude and the rates of inelastic processes such as the trimer formation and the relaxation of dimers into deeply bound molecular states.