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Updated: Oct 15, 2025

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Critical dynamics and phase transition of a strongly interacting warm spin gas
Yahel Horowicz1, Or Katz1, Oren Raz2
1Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel yahel.horowicz@weizmann.ac.il or.katz@duke.edu.
Abstract:
Phase transitions are emergent phenomena where microscopic interactions drive a disordered system into a collectively ordered phase. Near the boundary between two phases, the system can exhibit critical, scale-invariant behavior. Here, we report on a second-order phase transition accompanied by critical behavior in a system of warm cesium spins driven by linearly polarized light. The ordered phase exhibits macroscopic magnetization when the interactions between the spins become dominant. We measure the phase diagram of the system and observe the collective behavior near the phase boundaries, including power-law dependence of the magnetization and divergence of the susceptibility. Out of equilibrium, we observe a critical slowdown of the spin response time by two orders of magnitude, exceeding 5 s near the phase boundary. This work establishes a controlled platform for investigating equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of magnetic phases.
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