Tuning the strength of atom-atom interaction at ultra-low temperatures; prospects for controlling the atomic BEC

Guthrie B. Partridge

The pairing of fermionic particles is an essential ingredient of superconductivity and of the superfluidity of 3He. While such phenomena are accurately described by BCS theory in the limit of weak pairing strength, a complete understanding remains elusive when pairing strength is increased, such as in high temperature superconductors. We create ultracold gases of trapped fermionic 6Li atoms, through which we directly observe fermionic pairing. In our system, there are no impurities whatsoever, and parameters such as the number and temperature of the trapped atoms are precisely and independently controlled. In addition, a Feshbach resonance enables the continuous tuning of interaction strength and sign between the paired atoms. This control allows us to observe the smooth crossover of a molecular Bose Einstein condensate (MBEC) to a superfluid of weakly interacting Cooper pairs. With these tools, we have performed several fundamental measurements of pairing in fermionic systems.\nWe use optical molecular spectroscopy to precisely measure the closed-channel contribution to the many body state of paired 6Li atoms within a broad Feshbach resonance. The magnitude of this contribution is small, and supports the concept of universality for the description of broad Feshbach resonances. Moreover, the dynamics of the excitation provide clear evidence for pairing across the BEC-BCS crossover, and for the first time, into the weakly interacting BCS regime.\nWe also prepare a polarized Fermi gas with unequal numbers of two spin states of 6Li atoms. The real-space densities of the polarized, strongly-interacting, two-component Fermi gas reveal two low temperature regimes. At the lowest temperatures, the gas separates into a phase with a uniformly paired superfluid core surrounded by a shell of normal, unpaired atoms. This phase separation is accompanied by a spatial deformation of the core. At higher temperatures, the uniformly paired core persists, though it does not deform. This temperature dependence is consistent with a tri-critical point in the phase diagram. These measurements of pairing in a polarized Fermi gas are relevant to predictions of exotic phases of quark matter and magnetized superconductors.

K. J. Hughes, Óscar Viyuela García, J. M. Reeves +4 more

Thai M. Hoang, Martin Anquez, Bryce Robbins +4 more

Cooling atoms, both bosons and fermions, to ultra-low temperatures has provided the opportunity to probe distinct quantum phases of matter. The ability to then trap these atoms, or even molecules, in optical lattices and tune the interactions between them presents the possibility of an ideal and clean quantum system that can act as a surrogate for complex condensed-matter systems in which the tuning parameters may be limited. To date, most boson-boson and boson-fermion mixtures in this context have been formed with atoms of the same element. Forming more complex molecules with multiple elements offers the prospect of adding an anisotropic electric dipole interaction into the mix, thereby opening up a number of applications in quantum information processing and metrology. Voigt et al. demonstrate the formation and trapping of ultracold diatomic heteronuclear molecules using 6Li and 40K fermionic atoms. Forming long-lived bosonic molecules from two fermionic species with such different masses offers a rich parameter space in which to study many-body correlated systems with asymmetric interactions. — ISO

M. G. Ries, A. N. Wenz, G. Zürn +7 more

The condensation of fermion pairs lies at the heart of superfluidity. However, for strongly correlated systems with reduced dimensionality the mechanisms of pairing and condensation are still not fully understood. In our experiment we use ultracold atoms as a generic model system to study the phase transition from a normal to a condensed phase in a strongly interacting quasi-two-dimensional Fermi gas. Using a novel method, we obtain the in situ pair momentum distribution of the strongly interacting system and observe the emergence of a low-momentum condensate at low temperatures. By tuning temperature and interaction strength, we map out the phase diagram of the quasi-2D BEC-BCS crossover.

Mark Edwards