Abstract
The effects of combined external electric and magnetic fields on elastic collisions in ultracold Li-Rb mixtures are studied using recently obtained experimentally verified potentials. Our analysis provides both quantitative predictions for and a detailed physical interpretation of the phenomena arising from electric-field-induced interactions. It is shown that the electric field shifts the positions of intrinsic magnetic Feshbach resonances, generates copies of resonances previously restricted to a particular partial-wave collision to other partial-wave channels, and splits Feshbach resonances into multiple resonances for states of nonzero angular momenta. It was recently observed that the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction can also lift the degeneracy of a -wave state splitting of the associated -wave Feshbach resonance into two distinct resonances at different magnetic fields. Our work shows that the splitting of the resonances produced by an applied electric field is more than 1 order of magnitude larger. This phenomenon offers a complementary way to produce and tune an anisotropic interaction and to study its effect on the many-body physics of heteronuclear atomic gases.
5 More- Received 14 February 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.79.042711
©2009 American Physical Society