TY - JOUR T1 - Spontaneous dissociation of long-range Feshbach molecules JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2005 A1 - Thorsten Koehler A1 - Eite Tiesinga A1 - Paul S. Julienne AB - We study the spontaneous dissociation of diatomic molecules produced in cold atomic gases via magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances. We provide a universal formula for the lifetime of these molecules that relates their decay to the scattering length and the loss rate constant for inelastic spin relaxation. Our universal treatment as well as our exact coupled channels calculations for $^{85}$Rb dimers predict a suppression of the decay over several orders of magnitude when the scattering length is increased. Our predictions are in good agreement with recent measurements of the lifetime of $^{85}$Rb$_2$. VL - 94 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0408387v2 CP - 2 J1 - Phys. Rev. Lett. U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.020402 ER -