Suppressing the loss of ultracold molecules via the continuous quantum Zeno effect.
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2014;
112:070404. [PMID:
24579573 DOI:
10.1103/physrevlett.112.070404]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 37] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/03/2013] [Indexed: 06/03/2023]
Abstract
We investigate theoretically the suppression of two-body losses when the on-site loss rate is larger than all other energy scales in a lattice. This work quantitatively explains the recently observed suppression of chemical reactions between two rotational states of fermionic KRb molecules confined in one-dimensional tubes with a weak lattice along the tubes [Yan et al., Nature (London) 501, 521 (2013)]. New loss rate measurements performed for different lattice parameters but under controlled initial conditions allow us to show that the loss suppression is a consequence of the combined effects of lattice confinement and the continuous quantum Zeno effect. A key finding, relevant for generic strongly reactive systems, is that while a single-band theory can qualitatively describe the data, a quantitative analysis must include multiband effects. Accounting for these effects reduces the inferred molecule filling fraction by a factor of 5. A rate equation can describe much of the data, but to properly reproduce the loss dynamics with a fixed fillingfraction for all lattice parameters we develop a mean-field model and benchmark it with numerically exacttime-dependent density matrix renormalization group calculations.
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