Connecting Few-Body Inelastic Decay to Quantum Correlations in a Many-Body System: A Weakly Coupled Impurity in a Resonant Fermi Gas.
We study three-body recombination in an ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture. We first show theoretically that, for weak interspecies coupling, the loss rate is proportional to Tan's contact. Second, using a ^{7}Li/^{6}Li mixture we probe the recombination rate in both the thermal and dual superfluid regimes. We find excellent agreement with our model in the BEC-BCS crossover. At unitarity where the fermion-fermion scattering length diverges, we show that the loss rate is proportional to n_{f}^{4/3}, where n_{f} is the fermionic density. This unusual exponent signals nontrivial two-body correlations in the system. Our results demonstrate that few-body losses can be used as a quantitative probe of quantum correlations in many-body ensembles.
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS-PSL Research University, CNRS, UPMC-Sorbonne Universités, Collège de France, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France.
Sébastien
S
Laurent
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS-PSL Research University, CNRS, UPMC-Sorbonne Universités, Collège de France, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France.
Matthieu
M
Pierce
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS-PSL Research University, CNRS, UPMC-Sorbonne Universités, Collège de France, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France.
Marion
M
Delehaye
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS-PSL Research University, CNRS, UPMC-Sorbonne Universités, Collège de France, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France.
Tarik
T
Yefsah
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS-PSL Research University, CNRS, UPMC-Sorbonne Universités, Collège de France, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France.
Frédéric
F
Chevy
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS-PSL Research University, CNRS, UPMC-Sorbonne Universités, Collège de France, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France.
Christophe
C
Salomon