Eur. Phys. J. D 49, 75-84 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2008-00151-x

Role of the atom-atom scattering length and of symmetrization in unidimensional ultracold atom-diatom collisions

¹ Institut de Physique de Rennes, UMR CNRS 6251, University of Rennes 1, 35042 Rennes Cedex, France
² Department of Chemistry, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA
³ Institut UTINAM, UMR CNRS 6213, University of Franche-Comté, 25030 Besançon Cedex, France

Corresponding author: ^a goulven.quemener@unlv.edu

Received: 13 June 2008
Revised: 8 July 2008
Published online: 30 July 2008

Abstract

The role of the atom-atom scattering length and of the symmetrization in ultracold atom-diatom collisions in one dimension is presented. For an ultracold atom-diatom collision and for a diatomic molecule in its highest vibrational state, inelastic rate coefficients vanish for a system composed of fermionic atoms as the atom-atom scattering length increases whereas they do not for a system composed of bosonic atoms. The differences come from the symmetrization of the wavefunction of the systems. We explain these differences by comparing the shape of the effective potentials of the atom-diatom approach. For the fermionic system, we use a zero-range interaction to modelize the adiabatic energies and we give a lower estimate of the atom-diatom scattering length as a function of the atom-atom scattering length.