Magnetic control of ultra-cold ⁶Li and ¹⁷⁴Yb(³P<inf>2</inf>) atom mixtures with Feshbach resonances

Abstract

© 2015 IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. We theoretically evaluate the feasibility to form magnetically-tunable Feshbach molecules in collisions between fermionic 6Li atoms and bosonic metastable 174Yb(3P2) atoms. In contrast to the well-studied alkali-metal atom collisions, collisions with meta-stable atoms are highly anisotropic. Our first-principle coupled-channel calculation of these collisions reveals the existence of broad Feshbach resonances due to the combined effect of anisotropic-molecular and atomic-hyperfine interactions. In order to fit our predictions to the specific positions of experimentally-observed broad resonance structures (Dowd et al 2014) we optimized the shape of the short-range potentials by direct least-square fitting. This allowed us to identify the dominant resonance by its leading angular momentum quantum numbers and describe the role of collisional anisotropy in the creation and broadening of this and other resonances.