Photoreactions with universal trimers

Considering one-body and two-body currents, we study the photoassociation and photodissociation of universal bosonic trimers. Analyzing the relative importance of these currents, we identify two physical scenarios: (i) normal hierarchy, where naive power counting holds and the one-body current dominates, and (ii) strong hierarchy, where the one-body current is suppressed. For both scenarios we observe that at the high-frequency tail, the response function exhibits log-periodic oscillations in transition to or from any continuum state regardless of the reaction partial-wave channel. In contrast, near-threshold log-periodic oscillations appear only in the leading s-wave components. These oscillations are the fingerprints of universal Efimov physics. We discuss the relevance of this effect to contemporary experiments in ultracold atoms.