Orbital Feshbach resonances with a small energy gap between open and closed channels

Abstract

Recently a new type of Feshbach resonance, i.e., orbital Feshbach resonance (OFR) was proposed for the ultracold alkali-earth (like) atoms, and experimentally observed in the ultracold gases of $^{{\rm 173}}$Yb atoms. Unlike most of the magnetic Feshbach resonances of ultracold alkali atoms, when the OFR of $^{{\rm 173}}$Yb atoms appears, the energy gap between the thresholds of the open channel (OC) and the closed channel (CC) is much smaller than the characteristic energy of the inter-atomic interaction, i.e., the van der Waals energy. In this paper we study the OFR in the systems with small CC-OC threshold gap. We show that in these systems the OFR can be induced by the coupling between the OC and either an isolated bound state of the CC or the scattering states of the CC. Moreover, we also show that in each case the two-channel Huang-Yang pesudopoential is always applicable for the approximate calculation of the low-energy scattering amplitude. Our results imply that in the theoretical calculations for these systems it is appropriate to take into account the contributions from the scattering states of the CC.