Determination of the fermion pair size in a resonantly interacting superfluid

Christian H. Schunck (), Yong-il Shin, André Schirotzek and Wolfgang Ketterle
Additional contact information
Christian H. Schunck: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, and Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
Yong-il Shin: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, and Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
André Schirotzek: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, and Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
Wolfgang Ketterle: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, and Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

Nature, 2008, vol. 454, issue 7205, 739-743

Abstract: Fermionic superfluids: strong stuff Fermionic superfluidity requires the formation of particle pairs, the size of which varies depending on the system. Many properties of the superfluid depend on the pair size relative to the inter-particle spacing. For example, conventional superconductors comprise a superfluid of loosely bound, large Cooper pairs of electrons, while Bose-Einstein condensates contain tightly bound molecules. The microscopic properties of the fermion pairs can be probed with radio-frequency spectroscopy. However, previous results have been difficult to interpret due to strong final-state interactions that were not well understood. Schunck et al. realize a superfluid spin mixture in an ultracold gas of lithium atoms in which such interactions have negligible influence. They find that the spectroscopic pair size is smaller than the inter-particle spacing. These are the smallest pairs yet observed for fermionic superfluids. In a related experiment, Jin et al use a technique called photoemission spectroscopy to study the excitations in a strongly interacting gas of ultracold potassium atoms. Such studies are of interest because the physics is related to that of the high transition-temperature superconductors, which are not fully understood.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07176 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:454:y:2008:i:7205:d:10.1038_nature07176

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature07176

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().