Strong Dissipation Inhibits Losses and Induces Correlations in Cold Molecular Gases

Abstract

Atomic quantum gases in the strong-correlation regime offer unique\rpossibilities to explore a variety of many-body quantum phenomena.\rReaching this regime has usually required both strong elastic and weak\rinelastic interactions because the latter produce losses. We show that\rstrong inelastic collisions can actually inhibit particle losses and\rdrive a system into a strongly correlated regime. Studying the dynamics\rof ultracold molecules in an optical lattice confined to one dimension,\rwe show that the particle loss rate is reduced by a factor of 10. Adding\ra lattice along the one dimension increases the reduction to a factor of\r2000. Our results open the possibility to observe exotic quantum\rmany-body phenomena with systems that suffer from strong inelastic\rcollisions.