Optically Trapped Fermi Gases

John E. Thomas

Tomi Paananen

This is a study of ultra-cold Fermi gases in different systems. This thesis is focused on exotic superfluid states, for an example on the three component Fermi gas and the FFLO phase in optical lattices. In the two-components case, superfluidity is studied mainly in the case of the spin population imbalanced Fermi gases and the phase diagrams are calculated from the mean-field theory. Different methods to detect different phases in optical lattices are suggested. In the three-component case, we studied also the uniform gas and harmonically trapped system. In this case, the BCS theory is generalized to three-component gases. It is also discussed how to achieve the conditions to get an SU(3)-symmetric Hamiltonian in optical lattices. The thesis is divided in chapters as follows: Chapter 1 is an introduction to the field of cold quantum gases. In chapter 2 optical lattices and their experimental characteristics are discussed. Chapter 3 deals with two-components Fermi gases in optical lattices and the paired states in lattices. In chapter 4 three-component Fermi gases with and without a harmonic trap are explored, and the pairing mechanisms are studied. In this chapter, we also discuss three-component Fermi gases in optical lattices. Chapter 5 devoted to the higher order correlations, and what they can tell about the paired states. Chapter 6 concludes the thesis.

Kenneth M. O’Hara, Michael E. Gehm, S. R. Granade +2 more

Xiangchuan Yan, Da-Li Sun, Lu Wang +3 more

We report the experimental production of degenerate Fermi gases of 6Li atoms in an optical dipole trap. The gray-molasses technique is carried out to decrease the atomic temperature to 57 μK, which facilitates the efficient loading of cold atoms into the optical dipole trap. The Fermi degeneracy is achieved by evaporative cooling of a two-spin mixture of 6Li atoms on the Feshbach resonance. The degenerate atom number per spin is 3.5 × 104, and the reduced temperature T/T F is as low as 0.1, where T F is the Fermi temperature of the non-interacting Fermi gas. We also observe the anisotropic expansion of the atom cloud in the strongly interacting regime.

Kenneth M. O’Hara, Michael E. Gehm, S. R. Granade +2 more