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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Damping of a unitary Fermi gas
J Kinast1, A Turlapov, J E Thomas
1Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA.
Abstract:
We measure the temperature dependence of the radial breathing mode in an optically trapped, unitary Fermi gas of 6Li, just above the center of a broad Feshbach resonance. The damping rate reveals a clear change in behavior which we interpret as arising from a superfluid transition. We suggest pair breaking as a mechanism for an increase in the damping rate which occurs at temperatures well above the transition. In contrast to the damping, the frequency varies smoothly and remains close to the unitary hydrodynamic value. At low temperature T, the damping depends on the atom number only through the reduced temperature, and extrapolates to 0 at T = 0.
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