Improved Characterization of Elastic Scattering Near a Feshbach Resonance in 85Rb

We report extentions and corrections to the measurement of the Feshbach resonance in 85Rb cold atom collisions reported earlier [J. L. Roberts et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 5109 (1998)]. In addition to a better determination of the position of the resonance peak (154.9(4) gauss) and its width (11.0(4) gauss), improvements in our techniques now allow the measurement of the absolute size of the elastic scattering rate. This provides a new measure of the s-wave scasttering length as a function of magnetic field near the Feshbach resonance and contrains the Rb-Rb interaction potential.