Decay of Trapped Ultracold Alkali Atoms By Recombination

Using the knowledge of two-body collision properties that has recently become available, we estimate the three-body recombination rate for doubly spin-polarized ultracold gas samples of 7 Li, 23 Na and 87 Rb on the basis of the Jastrow approximation. We find that only recombination leading to the formation of the highest two-body bound states is important. The rate for the highest bound level with zero angular momentum is found to increase strongly with the absolute value of the two-body scattering length. Pacs number(s): 32.80.Pj,42.50.Vk Typeset using REVT E X I. INTRODUCTION One of the main goals of neutral atom cooling and trapping experiments is achieving the low temperatures and high densities needed to obtain Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). The past year has shown a rapid growth in phase space density towards or even beyond the critical line of the phase transition by several authors [1--4]. With the recent breakthrough to BEC by Anderson et al. [1] it becomes of incre..