Parametric tuning of dynamical phase transitions in ultracold reactions

Advances in ultracold chemistry have led to the possibility of a coherent transformation between ultracold atoms and molecules including between completely bosonic condensates. Such transformations are enabled by the magneto-association of atoms at a Feshbach resonance which results in a passage through a quantum critical point. In this study, we show that the presence of generic interaction between the formed molecules can fundamentally alter the nature of the critical point, change the yield of the reaction and the order of the consequent phase transition. We find that the correlations introduced by this rather general interaction induce nontrivial many-body physics such as coherent oscillations between atoms and molecules, and a selective formation of squeezed molecular quantum states and quantum cat states. We provide analytical and numerical descriptions of these many-body effects, along with scaling laws for the reaction yield in both the adiabatic and non-adiabatic regimes, and highlight the potential experimental relevance in quantum sensing.