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Updated: Jul 10, 2026

Quantifying Mixing using Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Published on: January 25, 2012
Pairing without superfluidity: the ground state of an imbalanced Fermi mixture
C H Schunck1, Y Shin, A Schirotzek
1Department of Physics, MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. chs@mit.edu
Abstract:
We used radio-frequency spectroscopy to study pairing in the normal and superfluid phases of a strongly interacting Fermi gas with imbalanced spin populations. At high spin imbalances, the system does not become superfluid even at zero temperature. In this normal phase, full pairing of the minority atoms was observed. Hence, mismatched Fermi surfaces do not prevent pairing but can quench the superfluid state, thus realizing a system of fermion pairs that do not condense even at the lowest temperature.
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