Observation of a Strongly Interacting Degenerate Fermi Gas of Atoms

By K. O’Hara, S. Hemmer, M. Gehm, S. Granade, John E. Thomas. Science, 2002

687 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on the observation of a highly degenerate, strongly interacting Fermi gas of atoms. Fermionic lithium-6 atoms in an optical trap are evaporatively cooled to degeneracy using a magnetic field to induce strong, resonant interactions. Upon abruptly releasing the cloud from the trap, the gas is observed to expand rapidly in the transverse direction while remaining nearly stationary in the axial direction. We interpret the expansion dynamics in terms of collisionless superfluid and collisional hydrodynamics. For the data taken at the longest evaporation times, we find that collisional hydrodynamics does not provide a satisfactory explanation, whereas superfluidity is plausible.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb099be0dbb04762403f0c1b80f43fdb1e3877b2

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Toward an AdS/cold atoms correspondence: A Geometric realization of the Schrodinger symmetry (2008, background): “Since its experimental realizations using trapped cold atoms at the Feshbach resonance [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12], this system has attracted enormous interest.”
Feshbach resonances in ultracold gases (2008, methodology): “(Jochim et al., 2002; O’Hara et al., 2002b) reported a strongly suppressed thermalization rate near 530 G, indicating the zero crossing of the scattering length in the ab channel.”
Theory of ultracold atomic Fermi gases (2007, methodology): “Strongly interacting regimes of fermionic atoms were achieved by O’Hara et al. (2002) and Bourdel et al. (2003) working at the resonance where the scattering length takes a divergent value.”
Making, probing and understanding ultracold Fermi gases (2008, background): “ ground state of strongly interacting fermions. The total energy of an interacting Fermi gas at or close to resonance was derived from measurements of the cloud size either in trap or after expansion [60, 344, 67, 72, 79, 345]. In an interesting variant, the Paris group applied a rapid switching of ”
Viscosity in strongly interacting quantum field theories from black hole physics. (2005, background): “These gases have been observed to behave hydrodynamically [27] and should have finite shear viscosity at nonzero temperature.”