Effective Control of Cold Collisions with Radio Frequency Fields

Abstract

We study $^{87}$Rb cold collisions in a static magnetic field and a single-color radio frequency (RF) field by employing the multi-channel quantum defect theory in combination with the Floquet method to solve the two-body time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation. Our results show that RF fields can modify the two-body scattering length by a large scale through Feshbach resonances both in low and high static magnetic field regimes. Such RF induced Feshbach resonances can be applied to quenching experiments or controlling interactions in spinor condensates. Here, we also show that analogous to photo-association, RF fields can also associate cold atoms into molecules at a useful rate.