High-resolution imaging of ultracold fermions in microscopically tailored optical potentials

Abstract

We report on the local probing and preparation of an ultracold Fermi gas on the length scale of one micrometer, i.e. of the order of the Fermi wavelength. The essential tool of our experimental setup is a pair of identical, high-resolution microscope objectives. One of the microscope objectives allows local imaging of the trapped Fermi gas of 6Li atoms with a maximum resolution of 660 nm, while the other enables the generation of arbitrary optical dipole potentials on the same length scale. Employing a 2D acousto-optical deflector, we demonstrate the formation of several trapping geometries including a tightly focussed single optical dipole trap, a 4x4-site two-dimensional optical lattice and a 8-site ring lattice configuration. Furthermore, we show the ability to load and detect a small number of atoms in these trapping potentials. A site separation of down to one micrometer in combination with the low mass of 6Li results in tunneling rates which are sufficiently large for the implementation of Hubbard-models with the designed geometries.

15 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Single-Atom Resolved Fluorescence Imaging of an Atomic Mott Insulator
• Experimental demonstration of painting arbitrary and dynamic potentials for Bose-Einstein condensates
• Experimental demonstration of single-site addressability in a two-dimensional optical lattice
• Speckle Imaging of Spin Fluctuations in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Versatile two-dimensional potentials for ultra-cold atoms

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Cooling a single atom in an optical tweezer to its quantum ground state
• Observing the Drop of Resistance in the Flow of a Superfluid Fermi Gas
• A versatile high resolution objective for imaging quantum gases
• Piezoelectrically-actuated time-averaged atomic microtraps