Non-universal bound states of two identical heavy fermions and one light particle

Abstract

We study the behavior of the bound state energy of a system consisting of two identical heavy fermions of mass M and a light particle of mass m. The heavy fermions interact with the light particle through a short-range two-body potential with positive s-wave scattering length a_s. We impose a short-range boundary condition on the logarithmic derivative of the hyperradial wavefunction and show that, in the regime where Efimov states are absent, a non-universal three-body state "cuts through" the universal three-body states previously described by Kartavtsev and Malykh [O. I. Kartavtsev and A. V. Malykh, J. Phys. B 40, 1429 (2007)]. The presence of the non-universal state alters the behavior of the universal states in certain regions of the parameter space. We show that the existence of the non-universal state is predicted accurately by a simple quantum defect theory model that utilizes hyperspherical coordinates. An empirical two-state model is employed to quantify the coupling of the non-universal state to the universal states.