Abstract
We study zero-energy collisions between three identical bosons with spin 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 - and -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 for and spinor condensates. This density can be reduced by tuning the two-body interactions to an - or -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.
- Received 11 May 2021
- Accepted 27 July 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.104.023321
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