Effective Range Corrections to Three-Body Recombination for Atoms with Large Scattering Length

Abstract

Few-body systems with large scattering length a have universal properties that do not depend on the details of their interactions at short distances. The rate constant for three-body recombination of bosonic atoms of mass m into a shallow dimer scales as \hbar a^4/m times a log-periodic function of the scattering length. We calculate the leading and subleading corrections to the rate constant which are due to the effective range of the atoms and study the correlation between the rate constant and the atom-dimer scattering length. Our results are applied to 4He atoms as a test case.

6 pages, 2 figures, improved discussion, final version