Unitarity-limited behavior of three-body collisions in a p -wave interacting Fermi gas

Abstract

We experimentally investigate the unitarity-limited behavior of the three-body loss near a p-wave Feshbach resonance in a single-component Fermi gas of $^6$Li atoms. At the unitarity limit, the three-body loss coefficient $L_{3}$ exhibits universality in the sense that it is independent of the interaction strength and follows the predicted temperature scaling law of $L_3 \propto T^{-2}$. When decreasing the interaction strength from the unitarity regime, the three-body loss coefficient as a function of the interaction strength and temperature can be described by the theory based on the association of an excited resonant quasibound state and its relaxation into a deep stable dimer by collision with a third atom in the framework of the standard Breit-Wigner theoretical approach. The results reported here are important to understand the properties of a resonant p-wave Fermi gas in the prospect of quantum few- and many-body physics.