Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Inelastic collisions of a Fermi gas in the BEC-BCS crossover
1Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 27708, USA.
Abstract:
We measure inelastic three-body and two-body collisional decay rates for a two-component Fermi gas of 6Li, which are highly suppressed by the Pauli exclusion principle. Our measurements are made in the BEC-BCS crossover regime, near the two-body collisional (Feshbach) resonance. At high temperature (energy) the data show a dominant three-body decay process, which is studied as a function of bias magnetic field. At low energy, the data show a coexistence of two-body and three-body decay processes near and below the Feshbach resonance. Below resonance, the observed two-body inelastic decay can arise from molecule-atom and molecule-molecule collisions. We suggest that at and above resonance, an effective two-body decay rate arises from collisions between atoms and correlated (Cooper) pairs that can exist at sufficiently low temperature.
Related Concept Videos
Elastic Collisions: Introduction
Fermi Level Dynamics
Electron affinity in semiconductors refers to the energy gap between the minimum of its conduction band and the vacuum level and it is a critical parameter in determining how easily a semiconductor can accept additional electrons.
The work...
Elastic Collisions: Case Study
Fermi Level
At absolute zero temperature, electrons fill all energy states up to the Fermi level, leaving upper states empty. As the temperature rises,...
The Kinetic Model of Gases
Kinetic Theory of an Ideal Gas
The number of molecules in one mole is called Avogadro's number...
