TY - JOUR T1 - Suppressing the loss of ultracold molecules via the continuous quantum Zeno effect JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2014 A1 - Bihui Zhu A1 - Bryce Gadway A1 - Michael Foss-Feig A1 - Johannes Schachenmayer A1 - Michael Wall A1 - Kaden R. A. Hazzard A1 - Bo Yan A1 - Steven A. Moses A1 - Jacob P. Covey A1 - Deborah S. Jin A1 - Jun Ye A1 - Murray Holland A1 - Ana Maria Rey AB - We investigate theoretically the suppression of two-body losses when the on-site loss rate is larger than all other energy scales in a lattice. This work quantitatively explains the recently observed suppression of chemical reactions between two rotational states of fermionic KRb molecules confined in one-dimensional tubes with a weak lattice along the tubes [Yan et al., Nature 501, 521-525 (2013)]. New loss rate measurements performed for different lattice parameters but under controlled initial conditions allow us to show that the loss suppression is a consequence of the combined effects of lattice confinement and the continuous quantum Zeno effect. A key finding, relevant for generic strongly reactive systems, is that while a single-band theory can qualitatively describe the data, a quantitative analysis must include multiband effects. Accounting for these effects reduces the inferred molecule filling fraction by a factor of five. A rate equation can describe much of the data, but to properly reproduce the loss dynamics with a fixed filling fraction for all lattice parameters we develop a mean-field model and benchmark it with numerically exact time-dependent density matrix renormalization group calculations. VL - 112 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.2221v2 CP - 7 J1 - Phys. Rev. Lett. U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.070404 ER -