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Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Quantum Degenerate Fermi Gas in an Orbital Optical Lattice
M Hachmann1,2, Y Kiefer1,2, J Riebesehl1
1Institut für Laserphysik, Universität Hamburg, 22761 Hamburg, Germany.
Abstract:
Spin-polarized samples and spin mixtures of quantum degenerate fermionic atoms are prepared in selected excited Bloch bands of an optical checkerboard square lattice. For the spin-polarized case, extreme band lifetimes above 10 s are observed, reflecting the suppression of collisions by Pauli's exclusion principle. For spin mixtures, lifetimes are reduced by an order of magnitude by two-body collisions between different spin components, but still remarkably large values of about 1 s are found. By analyzing momentum spectra, we can directly observe the orbital character of the optical lattice. The observations demonstrated here form the basis for exploring the physics of Fermi gases with two paired spin components in orbital optical lattices, including the regime of unitarity.
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