Stability of a unitary Bose gas

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We study the stability of a thermal ³⁹K Bose gas across a broad Feshbach resonance, focusing on the unitary regime, where the scattering length a exceeds the thermal wavelength λ. We measure the general scaling laws relating the particle-loss and heating rates to the temperature, scattering length, and atom number. Both at unitarity and for positive a ≪ λ we find agreement with three-body theory. However, for a<0 and away from unitarity, we observe significant four-body decay. At unitarity, the three-body loss coefficient, L₃ ∝ λ⁴, is three times lower than the universal theoretical upper bound. This reduction is a consequence of species-specific Efimov physics and makes ³⁹K particularly promising for studies of many-body physics in a unitary Bose gas.