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  • Collisions between Ultracol...
    Jurgilas, S; Chakraborty, A; Rich, C J H; Caldwell, L; Williams, H J; Fitch, N J; Sauer, B E; Frye, Matthew D; Hutson, Jeremy M; Tarbutt, M R

    Physical review letters, 2021-Apr-16, Letnik: 126, Številka: 15
    Journal Article

    We prepare mixtures of ultracold CaF molecules and Rb atoms in a magnetic trap and study their inelastic collisions. When the atoms are prepared in the spin-stretched state and the molecules in the spin-stretched component of the first rotationally excited state, they collide inelastically with a rate coefficient k_{2}=(6.6±1.5)×10^{-11}  cm^{3}/s at temperatures near 100  μK. We attribute this to rotation-changing collisions. When the molecules are in the ground rotational state we see no inelastic loss and set an upper bound on the spin-relaxation rate coefficient of k_{2}<5.8×10^{-12}  cm^{3}/s with 95% confidence. We compare these measurements to the results of a single-channel loss model based on quantum defect theory. The comparison suggests a short-range loss parameter close to unity for rotationally excited molecules, but below 0.04 for molecules in the rotational ground state.