1202.4444 (Mingwu Lu et al.)

Quantum degenerate dipolar Fermi gas    [PDF]

Mingwu Lu, Nathaniel Q. Burdick, Benjamin L. Lev

The interplay between crystallinity and superfluidity is of great fundamental
and technological interest in condensed matter settings. In particular,
electronic quantum liquid crystallinity arises in the non-Fermi liquid,
pseudogap regime neighboring a cuprate's unconventional superconducting phase.
While the techniques of ultracold atomic physics and quantum optics have
enabled explorations of the strongly correlated, many-body physics inherent in,
e.g., the Hubbard model, lacking has been the ability to create a quantum
degenerate Fermi gas with interparticle interactions---such as the strong
dipole-dipole interaction---capable of inducing analogs to electronic quantum
liquid crystals. We report the first quantum degenerate dipolar Fermi gas, the
realization of which opens a new frontier for exploring strongly correlated
physics and, in particular, the quantum melting of smectics in the pristine
environment provided by the ultracold atomic physics setting. A quantum
degenerate Fermi gas of the most magnetic atom 161Dy is produced by laser
cooling to 10 uK before sympathetically cooling with ultracold, bosonic 162Dy.
The temperature of the spin-polarized 161Dy is a factor T/TF=0.2 below the
Fermi temperature TF=300 nK. The co-trapped 162Dy concomitantly cools to
approximately Tc for Bose-Einstein condensation, thus realizing a novel, nearly
quantum degenerate dipolar Bose-Fermi gas mixture.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4444