Connecting Few-Body Inelastic Decay to Quantum Correlations in a Many-Body System: A Weakly Coupled Impurity in a Resonant Fermi Gas

摘要

We study three-body recombination in an ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture. We first show theoretically that, for weak interspecies coupling, the loss rate is proportional to Tan's contact. Second, using a Li-7/Li-6 mixture we probe the recombination rate in both the thermal and dual superfluid regimes. We find excellent agreement with our model in the BEC-BCS crossover. At unitarity where the fermion-fermion scattering length diverges, we show that the loss rate is proportional to n(f)(4/3), where n(f) is the fermionic density. This unusual exponent signals nontrivial two-body correlations in the system. Our results demonstrate that few-body losses can be used as a quantitative probe of quantum correlations in many-body ensembles.