Large anomalous shifts of potassium-39 Feshbach resonances

Abstract

We report the observation of large anomalous shifts, up to +7.5 G, of the positions of the 33.6 G and 39.9 G Feshbach resonances in potassium-39 atoms confined in a 1063.9 nm optical dipole trap (ODT) at temperatures up to around 35 μK and trap depths up to about 136 μK. When the atom cloud is cooled to lower temperatures, by reducing the trap depth of the ODT, the shifts decrease proportionally with trap depth and approach zero at zero depth. We show that the large observed shifts originate from a large differential ac Stark shift between the incoming pair of potassium-39 atoms and the weakly bound Feshbach molecule, which in turn originates from an unexpectedly large dynamic polarizability of the Feshbach molecule. The polarizabilities of the Feshbach molecules extracted from the measured shifts of the 33.6 G and 39.9 G resonances are about four to seven times the sum of the polarizabilities of the two incoming potassium-39 atoms, that is, about four to seven times larger than the usual polarizability of weakly bound Feshbach molecules. The large polarizabilities of the Feshbach molecules are attributed to a near-coincidence between the frequency of the 1063.9 nm ODT laser and the frequency of a molecular transition from the last vibrational level of the lowest triplet a3Σ+u potential to a vibrational level of the excited b3Σ+g potential. Other potassium-39 Feshbach resonances we have studied exhibit a zero or very small shift, corresponding to molecular polarizabilities close to the sum of the polarizabilities of the two incoming potassium-39 atoms.