Strong spin-exchange recombination of three weakly interacting Li7 atoms

Abstract

We reveal a significant spin-exchange pathway in the three-body recombination process for ultracold lithium-7 atoms near a zero-crossing of the two-body scattering length. This newly discovered recombination pathway involves the exchange of spin between all three atoms, which is not included in many theoretical approaches with restricted spin structure. Taking it into account, our calculation is in excellent agreement with experimental observations. To contrast our findings, we predict the recombination rate around a different zero-crossing without strong spin-exchange effects to be two orders of magnitude smaller, which gives a clear advantage to future many-body experiments in this regime. This work opens new avenues to study elementary reaction processes governed by the spin degree of freedom in ultracold gases.