Probing Photoinduced Two-Body Loss of Ultracold Nonreactive Bosonic 23Na 87Rb and 23Na 39K Molecules

We probe photoinduced loss for chemically stable bosonic 23Na 87Rb and 23Na 39K molecules in chopped optical dipole traps, where the molecules spend a significant time in the dark. We expect the effective two-body decay to be significantly suppressed due to the small expected complex lifetimes of about 13 and 6 μs for 23Na 87Rb and 23Na 39K, respectively. However, instead we do not observe any suppression of the two-body loss in parameter ranges where large loss suppressions are expected. We believe these unexpected results are most probably due to drastic underestimation of the complex lifetime by at least 1–2 orders of magnitude.