Eur. Phys. J. D (2014) 68: 261
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2014-40842-y

Regular Article

Spectral flow of trimer states of two heavy impurities and one light condensed boson

Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, 8000, Danemark

^a e-mail: zinner@phys.au.dk

Received: 31 December 2013
Received in final form: 2 May 2014
Published online: 24 September 2014

Abstract

The spectral flow of three-body (trimer) states consisting of two heavy (impurity) particles sitting in a condensate of light bosons is considered. Assuming that the condensate is weakly interacting and that an impurity and a boson have a resonant zero-range two-body interaction, we use the Born-Oppenheimer approximation to determine the effective three-body potential. We solve the resulting Schrödinger equation numerically and determine the trimer binding energies as a function of the coherence length of the light bosonic condensate particles. The binding energy is found to be suppressed by the presence of the condensate when the energy scale corresponding to the coherence length becomes of order the trimer binding energy in the absence of the condensate. We find that the Efimov scaling property is reflected in the critical values of the condensate coherence length at which the trimers are pushed into the continuum.