title: Ultracold Nonreactive Molecules in an Optical Lattice: Connecting Chemistry to Many-Body Physics.
abstract: We derive effective lattice models for ultracold bosonic or fermionic nonreactive molecules (NRMs) in an optical lattice, analogous to the Hubbard model that describes ultracold atoms in a lattice. In stark contrast to the Hubbard model, which is commonly assumed to accurately describe NRMs, we find that the single on-site interaction parameter U is replaced by a multichannel interaction, whose properties we elucidate. Because this arises from complex short-range collisional physics, it requires no dipolar interactions and thus occurs even in the absence of an electric field or for homonuclear molecules. We find a crossover between coherent few-channel models and fully incoherent single-channel models as the lattice depth is increased. We show that the effective model parameters can be determined in lattice modulation experiments, which, consequently, measure molecular collision dynamics with a vastly sharper energy resolution than experiments in a free-space ultracold gas.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.|Rice Center for Quantum Materials, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.
authors.forename: Andris
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Doçaj
authors.affiliation: JILA, NIST and University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0440, USA.
authors.forename: Michael L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Wall
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.|Rice Center for Quantum Materials, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.
authors.forename: Rick
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Mukherjee
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.|Rice Center for Quantum Materials, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.
authors.forename: Kaden R A
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Hazzard