Collisional stability of fermionic Feshbach molecules.
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.
JILA, Quantum Physics Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0440, USA. zirbel@jilau1.colorado.edu
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