Paper detail

Long-lived complexes and signatures of chaos in ultracold K2+Rb collisions

Lifetimes of complexes formed during ultracold collisions are of current experimental interest as a possible cause of trap loss in ultracold gases of alkali-dimers. Microsecond lifetimes for complexes formed during ultracold elastic collisions of K2 with Rb are reported, from numerically-exact quantum-scattering calculations. The reported lifetimes are compared with those calculated using a simple density-of-states approach, which are shown to be reasonable. Long-lived complexes correspond to narrow scattering resonances which we examine for the statistical signatures of quantum chaos, finding that the positions and widths of the resonances follow the Wigner-Dyson and Porter-Thomas distributions respectively.