When an impurity is immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate, impurity-boson interactions are expected to dress the impurity into a quasiparticle, the Bose polaron. We superimpose an ultracold atomic gas of 87 Rb with a much lower density gas of fermionic 40 K impurities. Through the use of a Feshbach resonance and RF spectroscopy, we characterize the energy, spectral width and lifetime of the resultant polaron on both the attractive and the repulsive branches in the strongly interacting regime. The width of the polaron in the attractive branch is narrow compared to its binding energy, even as the two-body scattering length formally diverges.The behavior of a dilute impurity interacting with quantum bath is a simplified yet nontrivial many-body model system with wide relevance to material systems. For example, an electron moving in an ionic crystal lattice is dressed by coupling to phonons and forms a quasiparticle known as a Bose polaron (see Fig. 1a) that is an important paradigm in quantum many-body physics [1]. Impurity atoms immersed in a degenerate bosonic or fermionic atomic gas are a convenient experimental realization for Bose or Fermi polaron physics, respectively. Recent theoretical work [2-9] has explored the Bose polaron case, and the ability to use a Feshbach resonance to tune [10] the impurity-boson scattering length a IB opens the possibility of exploring the Bose polaron in the strongly interacting regime [11][12][13][14]. Experiments to date [15][16][17][18][19][20] have focused on the weak Bose polaron limit. The Bose polaron in the strongly interacting regime is interesting in part because it represents step towards understanding a fully strongly interacting Bose system. While a IB can be tuned to approach infinity, the boson-boson scattering length a BB can still correspond to the meanfield limit. A dilute impurity interacting very strongly with a Bose gas that is otherwise in the mean-field regime is, on the one hand, something more difficult to model and to measure than a weakly interacting system. On the other hand it is theoretically more tractable, and empirically more stable than a single-component "unitary" Bose gas in which a BB diverges and thus every pair of atoms is strongly coupled [21].Our experiment employs techniques similar to those used in recent Fermi polaron measurements [22][23][24][25]. However, there are important differences between the Bose polaron and the Fermi polaron. From a theory point of view, the Bose polaron problem involves an interacting superfluid environment and also has the possibility of three-body interactions [14], both of which are not present for the Fermi polaron. And on the experimental side, both three-body inelastic collisions and the relatively small spatial extent of a BEC (compared to that of the impurity gas) create challenges for measurements of the Bose polaron. This work, in parallel with work done at Aarhus [26], describes the first experiments performed on Bose polarons in the strongly interacting regime. In our case, the impurity is fermi...

Femtochemistry techniques have been instrumental in accessing the short time scales necessary to probe transient intermediates in chemical reactions. In this study, we took the contrasting approach of prolonging the lifetime of an intermediate by preparing reactant molecules in their lowest rovibronic quantum state at ultralow temperatures, thereby markedly reducing the number of exit channels accessible upon their mutual collision. Using ionization spectroscopy and velocity-map imaging of a trapped gas of potassium-rubidium (KRb) molecules at a temperature of 500 nanokelvin, we directly observed reactants, intermediates, and products of the reaction 40K87Rb + 40K87Rb → K2Rb2* → K2 + Rb2. Beyond observation of a long-lived, energy-rich intermediate complex, this technique opens the door to further studies of quantum-state–resolved reaction dynamics in the ultracold regime.

Recent measurements of Efimov resonances for a number of ultracold atom species have revealed an unexpected universality, in which three-body scattering properties are determined by the van der Waals length of the two-body interaction potential. To investigate whether this universality extends to heteronuclear mixtures, we measure loss rate coefficients in an ultracold trapped gas of 40K and 87Rb atoms. We find an Efimov-like resonance in the rate of inelastic collisions between 40K87Rb Feshbach molecules and 87Rb atoms. However, we do not observe any Efimov-related resonances in the rates of inelastic collisions between three atoms. These observations are compared to previous measurements by the LENS group of Efimov resonances in a 41K and 87Rb mixture as well as to recent predictions.