Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Superfluid Expansion of a Rotating Fermi Gas
Christian H. Schunck, Martin W. Zwierlein, André Schirotzek, Wolfgang Ketterle
Abstract
We study the expansion of a rotating, superfluid Fermi gas. The presence and absence of vortices in the rotating gas are used to distinguish the superfluid and normal parts of the expanding cloud. We find that the superfluid pairs survive during the expansion until the density decreases below a critical value. Our observation of superfluid flow in the expanding gas at 1/kFa=0 extends the range where fermionic superfluidity has been studied to densities of 1.2x10(11) cm(-3), about an order of magnitude lower than any previous study.