Observation of a Strong Atom-Dimer Attraction in a Mass-Imbalanced Fermi-Fermi Mixture

We investigate a mixture of ultracold fermionic ⁴⁰K atoms and weakly bound ⁶Li⁴⁰K dimers on the repulsive side of a heteronuclear atomic Feshbach resonance. By radio-frequency spectroscopy we demonstrate that the normally repulsive atom-dimer interaction is turned into a strong attraction. The phenomenon can be understood as a three-body effect in which two heavy ⁴⁰K fermions exchange the light ⁶Li atom, leading to attraction in odd partial-wave channels (mainly p wave). Our observations show that mass imbalance in a fermionic system can profoundly change the character of interactions as compared to the well-established mass-balanced case.