Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 16, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
High-temperature pairing in a strongly interacting two-dimensional Fermi gas
Puneet A Murthy1, Mathias Neidig2, Ralf Klemt2
1Physics Institute, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany. murthy@physi.uni-heidelberg.de.
Abstract:
The nature of the normal phase of strongly correlated fermionic systems is an outstanding question in quantum many-body physics. We used spatially resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy to measure pairing energy of fermions across a wide range of temperatures and interaction strengths in a two-dimensional gas of ultracold fermionic atoms. We observed many-body pairing at temperatures far above the critical temperature for superfluidity. In the strongly interacting regime, the pairing energy in the normal phase considerably exceeds the intrinsic two-body binding energy of the system and shows a clear dependence on local density. This implies that pairing in this regime is driven by many-body correlations, rather than two-body physics. Our findings show that pairing correlations in strongly interacting two-dimensional fermionic systems are remarkably robust against thermal fluctuations.
Related Concept Videos
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 Pauli Exclusion Principle
Heat Capacities of an Ideal Gas II
Heat Capacities of an Ideal Gas III
Heat Capacities of an Ideal Gas I
Molar heat capacity quantifies the ratio of the amount of heat added (or removed) to increase (or decrease) the...
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...

