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Updated: May 18, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Correlations and pair formation in a repulsively interacting Fermi gas
Christian Sanner1, Edward J Su, Wujie Huang
1MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Degenerate Fermi gases quenched into strong repulsion remain paramagnetic, contrary to predictions. Rapid decay into bound pairs prevents studying equilibrium phases, suggesting repulsive Fermi gases do not transition to a ferromagnetic phase.
Area of Science:
- Quantum physics
- Ultracold atomic gases
Background:
- Degenerate Fermi gases near Feshbach resonances exhibit tunable interactions.
- Theoretical models predict phase transitions in strongly interacting Fermi gases.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate the behavior of a degenerate Fermi gas quenched into strong effective repulsion.
- Determine if a ferromagnetic phase transition occurs under these conditions.
Main Methods:
- Rapidly quenching a degenerate Fermi gas into the strongly repulsive regime near a Feshbach resonance.
- Monitoring spin fluctuations using speckle imaging.
Main Results:
- Samples remained in the paramagnetic phase even with arbitrarily large scattering lengths.
- Observed rapid decay into bound pairs within 10ℏ/E(F) for a wide range of interaction strengths.
- Prevented the study of equilibrium phases of strongly repulsive fermions.
Conclusions:
- Strongly repulsive Fermi gases do not undergo a ferromagnetic phase transition.
- Experimental observations contradict several theoretical predictions regarding phase transitions.
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