Three body recombination of ultracold dipoles to weakly bound dimers

Abstract

We use universality in two-body dipolar physics to study three-body recombination. We present results for the universal structure of weakly bound two-dipole states that depend only on the s-wave scattering length (a). We study threshold three-body recombination rates into weakly bound dimer states as a function of the scattering length. A Fermi golden rule analysis is used to estimate rates for different events mediated by the dipole-dipole interaction and a phenomenological contact interaction. The three-body recombination rate in the limit where AD contains terms which scale as a4, a2D2, and D4, where D is the dipolar length. When AD, the three-body recombination rate scales as D4. © 2010 The American Physical Society.