Abstract
We have investigated the ultracold interspecies scattering properties of metastable triplet He and Rb. We performed state-of-the-art ab initio calculations of the relevant interaction potential, and measured the interspecies elastic cross section for an ultracold mixture of metastable triplet and in a quadrupole magnetic trap at a temperature of 0.5 mK. Our combined theoretical and experimental study gives an interspecies scattering length , which prior to this work was unknown. More general, our work shows the possibility of obtaining accurate scattering lengths using ab initio calculations for a system containing a heavy, many-electron atom, such as Rb.
4 More- Received 17 April 2014
- Revised 15 July 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.90.022709
©2014 American Physical Society