Abstract
We study zero-energy collisions between three identical bosons with spin f=1 interacting via pairwise potentials. We quantify the corresponding three-body scattering hypervolumes, which parametrize the effective three-body interaction strengths in a many-body description of spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates. Our results demonstrate universal behavior of the scattering hypervolumes for strong s- and p-wave two-body interactions. At weak interactions, we find that the real parts of the scattering hypervolumes are predominantly determined by hard-hyperspherelike collisions, which we characterize by a simple formula. With this universal result, we estimate that spin mixing via three-body collisions starts to dominate over two-body spin mixing at a typical particle density of 1017cm-3 for Na23 and K41 spinor condensates. This density can be reduced by tuning the two-body interactions to an s- or p-wave dimer resonance or to a point where two-body spin mixing effectively vanishes. Another possibility to observe the effects of three-body spin mixing involves the application of weak magnetic fields to cancel out the effective two-body interaction strength in the characteristic timescale describing the spin dynamics.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 023321 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Physical Review A |
| Volume | 104 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Aug 2021 |
Funding
We thank Denise Ahmed-Braun, Gijs Groeneveld, and Silvia Musolino for stimulating discussions. This research is financially supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under Grant No. 680-47-623. V.E.C. acknowledges additional financial support from Provincia Autonoma di Trento and the Italian MIUR under the PRIN2017 projectCEnTraL.