Resonant atom-dimer collisions in cesium: Testing universality at positive scattering lengths

Abstract

We study the collisional properties of an ultracold mixture of cesium atoms and dimers close to a Feshbach resonance near 550G in the regime of positive $s$-wave scattering lengths. We observe an atom-dimer loss resonance that is related to Efimov's scenario of trimer states. The resonance is found at a value of the scattering length that is different from a previous observation at low magnetic fields. This indicates non-universal behavior of the Efimov spectrum for positive scattering lengths. We compare our observations with predictions from effective field theory and with a recent model based on the van der Waals interaction. We present additional measurements on pure atomic samples in order to check for the presence of a resonant loss feature related to an avalanche effect as suggested by observations in other atomic species. We could not confirm the presence of such a feature.