Observation of Heteronuclear Atomic Efimov Resonances

Abstract

Building on the recent experimental observation with ultracold atoms, we report the first experimental evidence of Efimov physics in a heteronuclear system. A mixture of ;{41}K and ;{87}Rb atoms was cooled to few hundred nanokelvins and stored in an optical dipole trap. Exploiting a broad interspecies Feshbach resonance, the losses due to three-body collisions were studied as a function of the interspecies scattering length. We observe an enhancement of the three-body collisions for three distinct values of the interspecies scattering lengths, both positive and negative, where no Feshbach resonances are expected. We attribute the two features at negative scattering length to the existence of two kinds of Efimov trimers, KKRb and KRbRb.