Probing Photoinduced Two-Body Loss of Ultracold Nonreactive Bosonic ^{23}Na^{87}Rb and ^{23}Na^{39}K Molecules

Phys Rev Lett. 2021 Oct 15;127(16):163401. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.163401.

Abstract

We probe photoinduced loss for chemically stable bosonic ^{23}Na^{87}Rb and ^{23}Na^{39}K 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 significantly suppressed due to the small expected complex lifetimes of about 13 and 6 μs for ^{23}Na^{87}Rb and ^{23}Na^{39}K, respectively. However, instead we do not observe any suppression of the two-body loss in parameter ranges where large loss suppressions are expected. We believe these unexpected results are most probably due to drastic underestimation of the complex lifetime by at least 1-2 orders of magnitude.