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Updated: May 26, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Synthetic partial waves in ultracold atomic collisions
R A Williams1, L J LeBlanc, K Jiménez-García
1Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and University of Maryland, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA.
Abstract:
Interactions between particles can be strongly altered by their environment. We demonstrate a technique for modifying interactions between ultracold atoms by dressing the bare atomic states with light, creating an effective interaction of vastly increased range that scatters states of finite relative angular momentum at collision energies where only s-wave scattering would normally be expected. We collided two optically dressed neutral atomic Bose-Einstein condensates with equal, and opposite, momenta and observed that the usual s-wave distribution of scattered atoms was altered by the appearance of d- and g-wave contributions. This technique is expected to enable quantum simulation of exotic systems, including those predicted to support Majorana fermions.
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