Strong dissipation inhibits losses and induces correlations in cold molecular gases

Understand

Atomic quantum gases in the strong-correlation regime offer unique possibilities to explore a variety of many-body quantum phenomena.

• Reaching this regime has usually required both strong elastic and weak inelastic interactions, as the latter produce losses.
• We show that strong inelastic collisions can actually inhibit particle losses and drive a system into a strongly-correlated regime.
• Studying the dynamics of ultracold molecules in an optical lattice confined to one dimension, we show that the particle loss rate is reduced by a factor of 10.