Collisions in a dual-species magneto-optical trap of molecules and atoms

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We study inelastic collisions between CaF molecules and 87 Rb atoms in a dual-species magneto-optical trap. The presence of atoms increases the loss rate of molecules from the trap. By measuring the loss rates and density distributions, we determine a collisional loss rate coefficient k 2 = (1.43 ± 0.29) × 10 −10 cm 3 s −1 at a temperature of 2.4 mK. We show that this is not substantially changed by light-induced collisions or by varying the populations of excited-state atoms and molecules. The observed loss rate is close to the universal rate expected in the presence of fast loss at short range, and can be explained by rotation-changing collisions in the ground electronic state.