Enhanced dimer relaxation in an atomic and molecular Bose-Einstein condensate

We derive a universal formula for the rate constant β for relaxation of a shallow dimer into deeply-bound diatomic molecules in the case of atoms with a large scattering length a. We show that β is determined by a and by 2 three-body parameters that also determine the binding energies and widths of Efimov states. The rate constant β scales like (ℎ/2π)a/m near the resonance, but the coefficient is a periodic function of ln(a) that may have resonant enhancement at values of a that differ by multiples of 22.7