No Arabic abstract
We measure the temperature of a deeply degenerate Fermi gas, by using a weakly interacting sample of heavier bosonic atoms as a probe. This thermometry method relies on the thermalization between the two species and on the determination of the condensate fraction of the bosons. In our experimental implementation, a small sample of 41K atoms serves as the thermometer for a 6Li Fermi sea. We investigate the evaporative cooling of a 6Li spin mixture in a single-beam optical dipole trap and observe how the condensate fraction of the thermometry atoms depends on the final trap depth. From the condensate fraction, the temperature can be readily extracted. We show that the lowest temperature of 6.3(5)% of the Fermi temperature is obtained, when the decreasing trap depth closely approaches the Fermi energy. To understand the systematic effects that may in uence the results, we carefully investigate the role of the number of bosons and the thermalization dynamics between the two species. Our thermometry approach provides a conceptually simple, accurate, and general way to measure the temperature of deeply degenerate Fermi gases. Since the method is independent of the specific interaction conditions within the Fermi gas, it applies to both weakly and strongly interacting Fermi gases.
Many-body quantum systems can exhibit a striking degree of symmetry unparalleled by their classical counterparts. While in real materials SU($N$) symmetry is an idealization, this symmetry is pristinely realized in fully controllable ultracold alkaline-earth atomic gases. Here, we study an SU($N$)-symmetric Fermi liquid of $^{87}$Sr atoms, where $N$ can be tuned to be as large as 10. In the deeply degenerate regime, we show through precise measurements of density fluctuations and expansion dynamics that the large $N$ of spin states under SU($N$) symmetry leads to pronounced interaction effects in a system with a nominally negligible interaction parameter. Accounting for these effects we demonstrate thermometry accurate to one-hundredth of the Fermi energy. We also demonstrate record speed for preparing degenerate Fermi seas, reaching $T/T_F = 0.12$ in under 3 s, enabled by the SU($N$) symmetric interactions. This, along with the introduction of a new spin polarizing method, enables operation of a 3D optical lattice clock in the band insulating-regime.
We report on the generation of a quantum degenerate Fermi-Fermi mixture of two different atomic species. The quantum degenerate mixture is realized employing sympathetic cooling of fermionic Li-6 and K-40 gases by an evaporatively cooled bosonic Rb-87 gas. We describe the combination of trapping and cooling methods that proved crucial to successfully cool the mixture. In particular, we study the last part of the cooling process and show that the efficiency of sympathetic cooling of the Li-6 gas by Rb-87 is increased by the presence of K-40 through catalytic cooling. Due to the differing physical properties of the two components, the quantum degenerate Li-6 K-40 Fermi-Fermi mixture is an excellent candidate for a stable, heteronuclear system allowing to study several so far unexplored types of quantum matter.
We realized a quantum geometric charge pump for a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the lowest Bloch band of a novel bipartite magnetic lattice. Topological charge pumps in filled bands yield quantized pumping set by the global -- topological -- properties of the bands. In contrast, our geometric charge pump for a BEC occupying just a single crystal momentum state exhibits non-quantized charge pumping set by local -- geometrical -- properties of the band structure. Like topological charge pumps, for each pump cycle we observed an overall displacement (here, not quantized) and a temporal modulation of the atomic wavepackets position in each unit cell, i.e., the polarization.
We introduce a novel minimally-disturbing method for sub-nK thermometry in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Our technique is based on the Bose-polaron model; namely, an impurity embedded in the BEC acts as the thermometer. We propose to detect temperature fluctuations from measurements of the position and momentum of the impurity. Crucially, these cause minimal back-action on the BEC and hence, realize a non-demolition temperature measurement. Following the paradigm of the emerging field of textit{quantum thermometry}, we combine tools from quantum parameter estimation and the theory of open quantum systems to solve the problem in full generality. We thus avoid textit{any} simplification, such as demanding thermalization of the impurity atoms, or imposing weak dissipative interactions with the BEC. Our method is illustrated with realistic experimental parameters common in many labs, thus showing that it can compete with state-of-the-art textit{destructive} techniques, even when the estimates are built from the outcomes of accessible (sub-optimal) quadrature measurements.
Mobile impurities in a Bose-Einstein condensate form quasiparticles called polarons. Here, we show that two such polarons can bind to form a bound bipolaron state. Its emergence is caused by an induced nonlocal interaction mediated by density oscillations in the condensate, and we derive using field theory an effective Schrodinger equation describing this for arbitrarily strong impurity-boson interaction. We furthermore compare with Quantum Monte Carlo simulations finding remarkable agreement, which underlines the predictive power of the developed theory. It is found that bipolaron formation typically requires strong impurity interactions beyond the validity of more commonly used weak-coupling approaches that lead to local Yukawa-type interactions. We predict that the bipolarons are observable in present experiments and describe a procedure to probe their properties.