We have produced a quantum degenerate Li-6 Fermi gas with up to 7 x 10^7 atoms, an improvement by a factor of fifty over all previous experiments with degenerate Fermi gases. This was achieved by sympathetic cooling with bosonic Na-23 in the F=2, upper hyperfine ground state. We have also achieved Bose-Einstein condensation of F=2 sodium atoms by direct evaporation.
We predict novel phenomena in the behavior of an ultra- cold, trapped gas of fermionic atoms. We find that quantum statistics radically changes the collisional properties, spatial profile, and off-resonant light scattering properties of the atomic fermion system, and we suggest how these effects can be observed.
We have produced a macroscopic quantum system in which a Li-6 Fermi sea coexists with a large and stable Na-23 Bose-Einstein condensate. This was accomplished using inter-species sympathetic cooling of fermionic Li-6 in a thermal bath of bosonic Na-23.
The physical properties of arbitrary half-integer spins $F = N - 1/2$ fermionic cold atoms trapped in a one-dimensional optical lattice are investigated by means of a low-energy approach. Two different superfluid phases are found for $F ge 3/2$ depending on whether a discrete symmetry is spontaneously broken or not: an unconfined BCS pairing phase and a confined molecular superfluid instability made of $2N$ fermions. We propose an experimental distinction between these phases for a gas trapped in an annular geometry. The confined-unconfined transition is shown to belong to the $Z_N$ generalized Ising universality class. We discuss on the possible Mott phases at $1/2N$ filling.
We study the statistical mechanics of random surfaces generated by NxN one-matrix integrals over anti-commuting variables. These Grassmann-valued matrix models are shown to be equivalent to NxN unita
We present a full symmetry classification of fermion matter in and out of thermal equilibrium. Our approach starts from first principles, the ten different classes of linear and anti-linear state transformations in fermionic Fock spaces, and symmetries defined via invariance properties of the dynamical equation for the density matrix. The object of classification are then the generators of reversible dynamics, dissipation and fluctuations featuring in the generally irreversible and interacting dynamical equations. A sharp distinction between the symmetries of equilibrium and out of equilibrium dynamics, respectively, arises from the different role played by `time in these two cases: In unitary quantum mechanics as well as in `micro-reversible thermal equilibrium, anti-linear transformations combined with an inversion of time define time reversal symmetry. However, out of equilibrium an inversion of time becomes meaningless, while anti--linear transformations in Fock space remain physically significant, and hence must be considered in autonomy. The practical consequence of this dichotomy is a novel realization of antilinear symmetries (six out of the ten fundamental classes) in non-equilibrium quantum dynamics that is fundamentally different from the established rules of thermal equilibrium. At large times, the dynamical generators thus symmetry classified determine the steady state non-equilibrium distributions for arbitrary interacting systems. To illustrate this principle, we consider the fixation of a symmetry protected topological phase in a system of interacting lattice fermions. More generally, we consider the practically important class of mean field interacting systems, represented by Gaussian states. This class is naturally described in the language of non-Hermitian matrices, which allows us to compare to previous classification schemes in the literature.