Probing photoinduced two-body loss of ultracold non-reactive bosonic 23Na87Rb and 23Na39K molecules, Physical Review Letters

Abstract

We probe photo-induced loss for chemically stable bosonic 23Na87Rb and 23Na39K molecules in chopped optical dipole traps where the molecules spend a significant time in the dark. We expect the effective two-body decay to be largely suppressed in chopped traps due to the small expected complex lifetimes of about 13μs and 6μs for 23Na87Rb and 23Na39K respectively. However, instead we do observe near-universal loss even at the lowest chopping frequencies we can probe. Our data thus either suggest a so far unknown loss mechanism or a drastic underestimation of the complex lifetime by at least one to two orders of magnitude.