Superfluid Quenching of the Moment of Inertia in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas

We report on the observation of a quenched moment of inertia as resulting from superfluidity in a strongly interacting Fermi gas. Our method is based on setting the hydrodynamic gas in slow rotation and determining its angular momentum by detecting the precession of a radial quadrupole excitation. The measurements distinguish between the superfluid or collisional origin of hydrodynamic behavior, and show the phase transition.

Lifetime of angular momentum in a rotating strongly interacting Fermi gas

We investigate the lifetime of angular momentum in an ultracold strongly interacting Fermi gas, confined in a trap with controllable ellipticity. To determine the angular momentum we measure the precession of the radial quadrupole mode. We find that in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance the deeply hydrodynamic behavior in the normal phase leads to a very long lifetime of the angular momentum. Furthermore, we examine the dependence of the decay rate of the angular momentum on the ellipticity of the trapping potential and the interaction strength. The results are in general agreement with the theoretically expected behavior for a Boltzmann gas.

Collective oscillations of a Fermi gas in the unitarity limit: Temperature effects and the role of pair correlations

We present detailed measurements of the frequency and damping of three different collective modes in an ultracold trapped Fermi gas of $^6$Li atoms with resonantly tuned interactions. The measurements are carried out over a wide range of temperatures. We focus on the unitarity limit, where the scattering length is much greater than all other relevant length scales. The results are compared to theoretical calculations that take into account Pauli blocking and pair correlations in the normal state above the critical temperature for superfluidity. We show that these two effects nearly compensate each other and the behavior of the gas is close to the one of a classical gas.