Three Body Recombination of Ultracold Dipoles to Weakly Bound Dimers

We use universality in two-body dipolar physics to study three-body recombination. We present results for the universal structure of weakly bound two-dipole states that depend only on the s-wave scattering length (a). We study threshold three-body recombination rates into weakly bound dimer states as a function of the scattering length. A Fermi golden rule analysis is used to estimate rates for different events mediated by the dipole-dipole interaction and a phenomenological contact interaction. The three-body recombination rate in the limit where a≫D contains terms which scale as a⁴, a²D², and D⁴, where D is the dipolar length. When a≪D, the three-body recombination rate scales as D⁴.