Photoassociation spectroscopy of a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We report on the high resolution photoassociation spectroscopy of a $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate to the ${1}_{g}({P}_{3∕2})$ $v=152$ excited molecular states. We demonstrate the use of spin dependent photoassociation to experimentally identify the molecular states and their corresponding initial scattering channel. These identifications are in excellent agreement with the eigenvalues of a hyperfine-rotational Hamiltonian. Using the observed spectra we estimate the change in scattering length and identify photoassociation laser light frequency ranges that maximize the change in the spin-dependent mean-field interaction energy.