Heavy solitons in a fermionic superfluid

Tarik Yefsah, Ariel T. Sommer, Mark J. H. Ku, Lawrence W. Cheuk, Wenjie Ji, Waseem S. Bakr and Martin W. Zwierlein ()
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Tarik Yefsah: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ariel T. Sommer: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Mark J. H. Ku: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lawrence W. Cheuk: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wenjie Ji: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Waseem S. Bakr: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Martin W. Zwierlein: MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature, 2013, vol. 499, issue 7459, 426-430

Abstract: Abstract Solitons—solitary waves that maintain their shape as they propagate—occur as water waves in narrow canals, as light pulses in optical fibres and as quantum mechanical matter waves in superfluids and superconductors. Their highly nonlinear and localized nature makes them very sensitive probes of the medium in which they propagate. Here we create long-lived solitons in a strongly interacting superfluid of fermionic atoms and directly observe their motion. As the interactions are tuned from the regime of Bose–Einstein condensation of tightly bound molecules towards the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer limit of long-range Cooper pairs, the solitons’ effective mass increases markedly, to more than 200 times their bare mass, signalling strong quantum fluctuations. This mass enhancement is more than 50 times larger than the theoretically predicted value. Our work provides a benchmark for theories of non-equilibrium dynamics of strongly interacting fermions.

Date: 2013
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DOI: 10.1038/nature12338

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