Collisional stability of a three-component degenerate Fermi gas
Abstract
We report on the creation of a degenerate Fermi gas consisting of a balanced mixture of atoms in three different hyperfine states of 6Li. This new system consists of three distinguishable Fermions with different and tunable interparticle scattering lengths a12, a13 and a23. We are able to prepare samples containing 5 · 104 atoms in each state at a temperature of about 215 nK, which corresponds to T/TF ≈ 0.37. We investigated the collisional stability of the gas for magnetic fields between 0 and 600 G and found a prominent loss feature at 130 G. From lifetime measurements we determined three-body loss coefficients, which vary over nearly three orders of magnitude.
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