Tara Drake

Observation of pseudogap behaviour in a strongly interacting Fermi gas

An ultracold gas of strongly interacting fermions exhibits a pseudogap phase in which pairs of fermions exist above the superfluid transition, but lack the phase coherence of a superfluid.

Verification of Universal Relations in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas

Many-body fermion systems are important in many branches of physics, including condensed matter, nuclear, and now cold atom physics. In many cases, the interactions between fermions can be approximated by a contact interaction. A recent theoretical advance in the study of these systems is the derivation of a number of exact universal relations that are predicted to be valid for all interaction strengths, temperatures, and spin compositions. These equations, referred to as the Tan relations, relate a microscopic quantity, namely, the amplitude of the high-momentum tail of the fermion momentum distribution, to the thermodynamics of the many-body system. In this work, we provide experimental verification of the Tan relations in a strongly interacting gas of fermionic atoms by measuring both the microscopic and macroscopic quantities in the same system.

Measurement of the Homogeneous Contact of a Unitary Fermi Gas

By selectively probing the center of a trapped gas, we measure the local, or homogeneous, contact of a unitary Fermi gas as a function of temperature. Tans contact, C, is proportional to the derivative of the energy with respect to the interaction strength and is thus an essential thermodynamic quantity for a gas with short-range correlations. Theoretical predictions for the temperature dependence of C differ substantially, especially near the superfluid transition, T(c), where C is predicted to either sharply decrease, sharply increase, or change very little. For T/T(F)>0.4, our measurements of the homogeneous gas contact show a gradual decrease of C with increasing temperature, as predicted by theory. We observe a sharp decrease in C at T/T(F)=0.16, which may be due to the superfluid phase transition. While a sharp decrease in C below T(c) is predicted by some many-body theories, we find that none of the predictions fully account for the data.

Probing local quantities in a strongly interacting Fermi gas

The collective behavior of an ensemble of strongly interacting fermions is central to many physical systems, and its theoretical description is challenging due to the many-body nature of the problem. The ultracold Fermi gas is an ideal model system to shed light on this issue, as it provides excellent controllability, reproducibility, and unique detection methods. One of the problems, however, which complicates the interpretation of such experiments is the inherent density inhomogeneity of the gas due to harmonic confinement. We have developed a technique to overcome this difficulty by selectively probing atoms near the center of a trapped gas while still retaining momentum resolution. In this contribution to the 21th International Conference on Laser Spectroscopy (ICOLS 2013), we give an overview of this technique and some of the observations that have resulted from its implementation.

Direct observation of the Fermi surface in an ultracold atomic gas

The ideal (i.e. noninteracting), homogeneous Fermi gas, with its characteristic sharp Fermi surface in the momentum distribution, is a fundamental concept relevant to the behavior of many systems. With trapped Fermi gases of ultracold atoms, one can realize and probe a nearly ideal Fermi gas, however these systems have a nonuniform density due to the confining potential. We show that the effect of the density variation, which typically washes out any semblance of a Fermi surface step in the momentum distribution, can be mitigated by selectively probing atoms near the center of a trapped gas. With this approach, we have directly measured a Fermi surface in momentum space for a nearly ideal gas, where the average density and temperature of the probed portion of the gas can be determined from the location and sharpness of the Fermi surface.