Abstract Submitted for the DAMOP11 Meeting of The American Physical Society Study of the Lee-Huang-Yang correction for atomic bosons1

Submitted for the DAMOP11 Meeting of The American Physical Society Study of the Lee-Huang-Yang correction for atomic bosons1 ROBERT WILD, JILA/University of Colorado, JUAN PINO, PHILIP MAKOTYN, ERIC CORNELL, DEBORAH JIN — The famous Lee-Huang-Yang (LHY) term describes the first-order correction to the mean-field energy for strongly interacting bosons [1], yet it has only been detected with bosons composed of loosely bound fermion pairs [2,3]. Tan’s universal relations, originally calculated for fermions [4], connect a property called the Contact to many macroscopic parameters of a quantum gas, such as its total energy. These relations have been verified experimentally for Fermi systems [5]. We apply these relations to a Bose gas to realize a unique tool to study the LHY correction. We perform RF spectroscopy on a BEC of 85Rb close to a Feshbach resonance, and measure the strength of the RF lineshape tail which decays as 1/w3/2. From this we extract the Contact, which increases as a function of the interaction strength. This allows us to quantitatively study the LHY term for atomic bosons, as well as investigate time-dependent effects that arise from the rate of change of the interaction strength compared to various experimental time scales. 1We would like to acknowledge funding from the ONR and the NSF. Philip Makotyn JILA/University of Colorado Date submitted: 04 Feb 2011 Electronic form version 1.4