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Updated: Jun 8, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Ion acoustic waves in ultracold neutral plasmas
J Castro1, P McQuillen, T C Killian
1Department of Physics and Astronomy and Rice Quantum Institute, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.
Abstract:
We photoionize laser-cooled atoms with a laser beam possessing spatially periodic intensity modulations to create ultracold neutral plasmas with controlled density perturbations. Laser-induced fluorescence imaging reveals that the density perturbations oscillate in space and time, and the dispersion relation of the oscillations matches that of ion acoustic waves, which are long-wavelength, electrostatic, density waves.
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